Celestial Navigation

by Paulette Jiles

By the highly acclaimed author of the novel Enemy Women

Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

Now back in print, Paulette Jiles’s celebrated, multi-award-winning poetry collection. These are poems of scorching intensity, which examine the politics of childhood and love; explore the rigours and blessings of living in the far north; mark the way stations of a life of discovery and exploration. The result is a poetry of singular, telling immediacy.

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Paulette Kay Jiles was an American poet, memoirist and novelist.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is divided into six parts: "Waterloo Express", "Paper Matches", "Griffon Poems", "Northern Radio", "As the Night Goes", and "Turning Forty"...

From "Waterloo Express"...

It was history he carved out in the bare air
full of our rock-chips;
we took our place among the created things, joined
at the back like Siamese twins.
And now we are separated,
he has gone off with all the organs
and I am left without a heart;
no new beginnings.

I have walked into every whorehouse this side
of Tangiers.
I have kept my mouth shut more than I
imagined possible.
I have played the musician's girl
and not made
very much noise.

Today at the cove
I made plans to abduct my existence
into depths where anyone cannot reach me.
I become elastic.
Like a cured paralytic,
I found I could move
without embarrassment.

- One Man Gone, pg. 24

From "Paper Matches"...

Everyone has parents, even parents. There
is the Family Novel, in which they are all
children, only some
are more powerful than others.
Getting money out of parents has
become harder lately,
they claim they have spent their allowances
and won't share their Sweet Maries.
On deserted streets, kicking piles
of chestnut leaves,
your mother comes home from school
late and reluctantly.

- Family Novel, pg. 47

From "Griffon Poems"...

Long ago (this is a story) an exploding star
became a lighthouse
somewhere to the left of the equator.

Solar winds blew its hair around.
After such a birth,
what kind of life awaits it?

My mast draws circles around the
lighthouse - star
waves like hair comb themselves, we are

running northwestward down an unknown
coast. O nocturnal
ballads, ship of the auroral ocean,

we are marked with moon spots. I feel
the rush of water lay
on the rudder like a giant snake, the

tiller shakes, the water talks to me
in this morse. Left
and right the red and green running lights

shine through glass walls of fresh water.
Sailing is one of
the varieties of love, it is one of the

varieties of solitude, it is prayer-dancing
with the new world.
Language has flown away from me in one of

the varieties of devotion to water. To
devotion, to
lighthouses.

- The Bosun, pg. 79

From "Northern Radio"...

The mind recuperates slowly, it takes a while.
Slowly turning in its nest at night, it
wonders, yes, it wonders, it has its
doubts.

The brain is something else. In the
morning it turns on like a lightbulb,
the tongue like a chain unleashing it,
prepared for the radio-shack and the powder snow:
turn on the transmitter, broadcast brain-music.

The mind is more admirable and more bruised.
Sometimes it will not appear at all
sluggish and offended. There is nothing you can
offer is but the situation.
The brain is happy with anything.

- Northern Radio, pg. 98

From "As the Night Goes"...

A door opened to another world
and a blue heron flew out.

A canoe sailed into the epicentre
and turned to glass.

The filmthat runs always in the brain stalls and burns
its image. Trees fell into ovens, a design in black

was fired onto the face of the earth, and over this water,
this solution of ash and acid, we travel between

the pages of a new world, filling in blanks, voices (where
there were none) noises (where the wind pulls a long note

of silence through black flutes).

- Through the Burn/1980, pg. 111