The Green Word

by Erín Moure

This first "selected" collection of poetry by the well-known Governor-General's Literary Award winner covers 20 years of work and traces the development of her powerful and disquieting feminist style. It charts the razor sharp edges her poetry continues to travel, along the boundaries where meaning is constructed. The body, women's bodies in particular, and language intersect to dislocate expectation and reinvent the world.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1994

About the author

Erín Moure is a transborder poet and translator of poetry and poetics. In Canada, the USA, and the UK (variously), she has published seventeen books of poetry, and several books of prose including a memoir and a book of short takes on translation. Her most recent book is Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (ed. Shannon Maguire, Wesleyan 2017). She is the translator or co-translator of seventeen books of poetry and three books of non-fiction (biopoetics) from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese into English. Her translation of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat, 2017) was a finalist for a 2018 Best Translated Book Award. She holds two honorary doctorates for her contributions to poetry and translation, from Brandon University in Canada and the Universidade de Vigo in Spain. She lives in Montreal.

Reviews

[mwpm · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dictator's former aide reports
three hundred thousand killed.
7am, in the dining car serving serving breakfast, here
morning is open, the season
ripe w/ food.
No tanks in the kitchen.
No one hides in the bush, takes aim, there are
no bullets, just
the random ritual of eggs.
In the dining room innocent passengers
eat their path into the day.
The waiters banter back & forth.
Harry is in the washroom drinking beer.
Alex stands in the pantry, in everyone's road, giving
Information. About his girlfriend.
Three hundred thousand killed.
In the kitchen, the chef careens against fridges,
eyes out of sync, drunk.
Cyclone Todd fries eggs & yells.
His face the same sweaty colour.
Killed.

This moment, this day, to UPI
the dictator's former aide reports
three hundred thousand killed.
In the dining car, now nearly at Wabamun,
sun & bright snow, on schedule, no
bullets, no armed men in the field,
nowhere the obese tyrant shouting Fire!
his chest clotted w/ medals, his own people
bloated in rivers, mouths gaped, utter
lost defiance or
the homage no one can know -

- Homage, pg. 7

* * *

in the hallway, three men mark
walls w/ chalk, at points
where charges will be placed.
They are working to demolish one of the rooms.
To see if the house remains standing,
& what it will say. Surprise
or what. The room is the heart
of the building, has four corners only.
When it is done, ghosts will return
to examine the area
for clean breaks. One w/ pen
will draw them in cipher.
Wait. A woman steps from
the room, declares herself
to be the heart. She knows all the syllables
of detonation. She knows there are other cities
in the universe, but no maps.
She says she has tried to make them.
Her mouth full of chalk & tears...

- This Time-Warp Is a Description of Robbers, for Susan Penner, pg. 18

* * *

Bliss on the cats!
Your heaven was suffering for you
until it drowned.
Outside, the cats on the hard fence above the snow, they are
the horizon stepping closer & closr
until distance is just white,
cut-off from us
A horizon of stippled fur moving across the snow, snow
falling even into the ocean,
its grey descent holds us. Without it we are lonely
as a prairie is.
The cook fallen out of the train near Artland,
his white clothes on the track, snow around him,
his body
It could be he was lonely, as an ocean is lonely,
pulling the soft tongues of snow into it,
making its tides alone
Men & their measurements clotted on the shore
Cold surety, dim
beings in their skins, consoling each other.
Bliss on the cats!
They've got away now.
The cook fell not in the ocean but
in Saskatchewan, a horizon pulled him under.
The dream that came explaining everything:

Your heaven was suffering for you
until it drowned, it said.
So bliss on the cats,
pulling the horizon like so much cardboard.
He was alone forever, when the next train came

- Bliss, pg. 23

* * *

The core that eludes me, the words
un-spoken, pulled back into the tongue.
It is the tear-space inside the wall, where
the seventy years are waiting,
their mouths round with o's.
It is the seven nights of the body.
The beginning of the spine.
Sleep without measure.
Sash flung up & down.
Outside in.
It is the air.
When it meets my face, my mouth opens.
It is not fear.
It is what we fear.
It is the green trees rushing upward from the boulevard.
It is green everywhere.
It is not the hung figure.
It is not maleness.
It is grass. It is the tree.
It is the sound of hands.

- What the Woman Remembers of Her Dying, on the Street Before the Ambulance Came, pg. 37

* * *

I am the one who lies, slowly, closer
to your arm.
I insinuate.
The trip trip of the rain into wet earth &
the traffic noise.
This kind of a hush, she said.
Lifting her arms over her head so gently
in a gesture of, longing.
We are all innocent beings with our bathtubs & literary
pure enforcement.
I don't know if there's any difference between men & women
is just a lie.
The word human being has stood for men
until now.

Until now.

When she puts her arm down, in innocence,
I'll show her.

- Ocean Poem, pg. 50

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible and ahead-of-its time collection. I loved every single poem and found it to constantly bring to life new images and invocations.