Deepwater vee
Date
2011-06-03
Authors
Siebert, Melanie
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Abstract
Deepwater Vee began as a meditation on the rivers I have worked on as a wilderness
guide—the Nahanni, the Thelon, the Burnside, the Tatshenshini / Alsek, and others. The
lyric poems take wobbly bearings and try to track the phenomenal world. This collection
of nature poetry also considers two of Canada’s most threatened waterways—the
Athabasca, which runs through the heart of the Alberta tar sands, and the North
Saskatchewan, the river that ran by my home but which I had never paddled until
recently, a river stressed by dams and upgraders, sewage and pesticides. These rivers
push the poems into a contemplation of loss and into the terrain of Alexander
MacKenzie’s dreams, a busker’s street riffs and the imagined wanderings of a
grandmother who returns to inhabit the earth.
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Keywords
poetry, nature poetry, rivers, meditative poetry