Notes on Arrival and Departure: Poems

by Rachel Rose

Rachel Rose follows her award-winning first book with a dazzling, urgent collection of new poems that look unflinchingly at our errors and our longings, in images that range from the disturbing to the spectacular. Anchoring the collection is a rich, unsentimental suite of lyrics on the journey of pregnancy and new motherhood. These poems are humanist, lushly imagined, and compellingly voiced.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2005

About the author

Rachel Rose is the author of The Octopus Has Three Hearts, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2021. As well, she is the author of four collections of poetry, including Marry & Burn, which received a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for a Governor General’s Award. Her memoir, The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops, was shortlisted for the 2018 Arthur Ellis award for best non-fiction crime book. A former fellow at The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, she is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Vancouver and Co-Director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive (https://vancouvermanuscriptintensive.... )

Reviews

[Mary Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Longer, plainer poems take us into the realities and twists of middle-aged responsibility, where love and beauty are grabbed at in snatches. Poems of domesticity, of making do and carrying on: "arranging our dental appointments, play dates, /separating the whites from the darks, /writing in the spaces in between."

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't normally read poetry, but this is amazing. Narrative style poetry about life and death, the transformative process of becoming a mom, queernees, war, etc. It's political, it's revealing, it's intensely personal - I love it.

[Patrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book as a gift and it was my introduction to contemporary poets/poetry. I saw myself in many of the pages. I cried and cried.