Literary Previewfrom The Edmonton JournalBy Richard Helm
EDMONTON -- Some people will try to tell you that poetry is seizing the public mind these days like never before, that rhythm and rhyme somehow illuminate these querulous times.
Agnes Walsh holds no such illusions. She agrees that poetry is an "excited language," as it's been described by writer John Steffler, but she knows it's a language that only a minority of us will ever choose to speak.
"To me poetry has always been a special kind of thing, and by that I certainly don't mean elite. But it's a rare kind of bird," says Walsh, the inaugural poet laureate for St. John's, N.L.
"You can put poetry on the buses and all that, and it's going to catch the eyes of people, but I don't think it's ever going to be anything more than what it is."
Just what it is should be on grand display at Catalyst Theatre tonight when Walsh and her barnstorming companion, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, team up for a night of readings with local poets Ted Blodgett and Alice Major, Edmonton's current and past poets laureate, respectively. The four are part of a growing club across the land. There are now 19 poets laureate in Canada, including the parliamentary poet laureate, provincial laureates and municipal laureates like Walsh and Neilsen Glenn, the official bard for Halifax...
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Going Around with Bachelors by Agnes Walsh, published by Brick Books, is available as a digital download on the Rattling Books website (the print version can be found on Brick's website). Agnes Walsh's first poetry collection, In the Old Country of My Heart, is available as an audio book from Rattling Books.
