We are glad to publish “Awareness”, a fine poetry collection by two fine Canadian poets: Katherine L. Gordon and James Deahl. Live Encounters Poetry and Writings featured their poems from this book in the August issue (Katherine’s two poems & James Deahl’s two poems). Epoch Quarterly (Taiwan, 创世纪诗刊 has featured their poems from this book with Anna Yin’s translations (Chinese) in fall issue 2024 #220.
About the authors:
Katherine L. Gordon is a poet, publisher, author, editor, anthologist, judge, reviewer and literary critic. She has many books, chapbooks, co-operative books and anthologies internationally. She is the recipient of many awards including Best Foreign Author from the 9th international edition of “I Colori Dell Anima” Italy. She earned an award from The World Poetry Association for her contribution to peace poetry. Her work is translated into many languages and will appear this year in a U.S./Korean anthology and two international collections in Italy and China. Katherine believes that poetry is a unifying force across the planet.
James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh during 1945, and grew up in that city as well as in and around the Laurel Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains. He moved to Canada in 1970. He is the author or editor of over thirty books (mostly poetry) and is the author of fifteen poetry chapbooks. A cycle of his poems is the focus of a one-hour American television special, Under The Watchful Eye. As a literary critic, Deahl has written about Milton Acorn, Raymond Souster, and Bruce Meyer, as well as sixteen leading poets of the Confederation Period, and he has presented university lectures on Alden Nowlan, Robert Kroetsch, Canadian Postmodernism, and the People’s Poetry tradition.
Introduction by George Elliott Clarke, & Afterword by John B. Lee:
Awareness is the down-to-earth aspect of lofty, head-in-the-clouds Consciousness … Both poets write out of the irreconcilable tension between preserving and fostering “Paradise”… and the possibility of crafting “Utopia,” some form of communal, sharing-based governance or polity, balancing economics and ecology… Katherine’s voice is that of a transcendentalist or a shaman, she is of the Garden and James Deahl is of the Forest, James tends to position his speaker out-of-doors in uncultivated spaces, where the speaker’s reflection juxtaposes natural processes and unnatural horrors…. And the delivered personage knows: Poetry is Truth exceeding Political Science, Anthropology, and Sociology, and there ain’t no turning away.
— George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada (2016 & 17)
“If as I believe, there is a sacred duty in care-filled description, in an effort to capture a moment in lyric brevity of a well-crafted poem, to seek and find and set the best words in the best order on the page, then Katherine L. Gordon and James Deahl might be said to be doing their devoirs in the long tradition of an interweaving of poems in their fine collection Awareness….They interweave their poems so their voices achieve a kind of harmony…we come to see, to feel, to taste, to touch, (and in the music of the lines) to hear a reifying and reverential aspiration to capture the natural world…we all leave in our wake when we touch the words…although there is much to lament in our spoliation, these poems celebrate hopefulness ”
–John B. Lee, Poet Laureate of the city of Brantford, of Norfolk County and of Canada Cuba Literary Alliance
