The Seasons (Digital Edition)

Primary Author: 
Bruce Meyer
$4.99
The Seasons

A collection of tender love poems, The Seasons offers readers a glimpse into the many moments of beauty and promise between a lover and his beloved.

About the Book

If haiku in Japanese literature is a word picture that seizes a moment, the sonnet in the English tradition is a sound picture that makes time stand still. The Seasons is a book of whispers spoken by a voice to his beloved. Inspired by the original meaning of the word ‘sonnet’ (‘a little sound’), Bruce Meyer transforms the poetic framework to record the intimate moments in the lives of two people. The accumulation of those moments is what comprises the lives of those two people, and the reader is invited to eavesdrop on the utterances and promises of their lives. Written over a ten-year period and finally collected here, The Seasons takes up the process of a century of sonnets where each, as in the tradition of Neruda’s 100 Sonnets, is a little whisper in the ear of the lover

Read an Excerpt

The Change

Tourists come from all over the world
to celebrate the vibrant death of nature.

They point their cameras as if to write haiku
and attempt to make beauty a souvenir.

But the colour always dies in its own brilliance.
It is never as real as when it is real, never

as beautiful as when I see you emerging
from a gathering of bright golden birches

with one last flower in your hand that frost
overlooked as it flowed through our sleep.

The cold rock I rest against is foreboding.
It knows its cooled igneous will triumph.

In the meantime, purple aster clings to you,
draws life from you the way a bee drinks nectar.

Words

Leaves that crunch beneath our footsteps
are words that have fallen in the silences

between us. They are brightly coloured,
yellow, red, soft gold, and sunset orange.

They are words that form clever disguises,
covering the place where even shadows fade.

They keep their secrets. They mask our trails.
Listen. The wind is moving through thin arms

that rise and try to touch the sky with need.
They are hands that long for other hands,

fingers curling around the dwindling light.
So many words seem to have died in silence.

So many brightly coloured hopes lie scattered.
Watch where you walk. There is life in them still.

About the Author

authorPic

Bruce Meyer is author of numerous books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, pedagogy, and literary journalism. His broadcasts on The Great Books became the CBC’s bestselling spoken-word audio series, and evolved into the national bestseller, The Golden Thread: A Reader’s Journey Through the Great Books. He is professor of English at Georgian College, and teaches for Laurentian University, Victoria College in the University of Toronto, and St. Michael’s College Continuing Education Program. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie, and lives in Barrie, Ontario with his wife and daughter.

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Price: $4.99