In her elegant new collection, Alison Pick, a brilliant poet of sensuous moods, atmospheres, and dreams, explores the mystery concealed within the world we know and recognize. Always evocative, always alluring, her poems are not interested in mere events, but in the fabric inside the emotions that events can provoke. She writes of love, of leaving, of wandering, and of home — not necessarily in that order. With captivating language and shining imagery, her poems travel out through layers of landscape — residential, geographic, emotional, cerebral — creating a guidebook to the hidden, a sparkling tour through the lush and varied backcountry of human experience.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

The Dream World was written over a five-year period during which my partner and I moved from the mainland to Newfoundland and back again. To change place is to stir up the concept of home, both real and imagined: homes inhabited, homes lost, homes we only ever longed for. Landscape is a door that opens onto desire, and many of these poems come from the struggle for belonging, in a particular location and in the physical world in general. This is my third book, and I was interested in exploring the frontiers of language, the place where words fall down in the face of the numinous, where both our feelings and what lies beyond human experience seem fundamentally unsayable. Finally, I was reading as widely as possible in the Humanities during the writing process, and I wanted to push the life of the mind up against poetry (which for me had previously been an intuitive and visceral enterprise). The Dream World is a collision of thought, feeling, and imagination, a world with borders wide enough–I hope–to encompass it all.
-- Alison Pick

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

“Pick’s wonderfully personal, lyrical language takes the reader to the spiritual heart of things. Meditative and often elegiac, this is language that sings and is always in the right key.”
- Jury citation, E.J. Pratt Poetry Award

“Pick’s voice remains clearly her own, consistently so, and remarkable throughout for its calmness and stillness . . . this is a voice to be reckoned with.”
- The Fiddlehead

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

Alison Pick’s writing has appeared in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, and enRoute Magazine. Her first collection of poems, Question & Answer, was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award and the E.J. Pratt Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award. In 2002, Pick won the Bronwen Wallace Award for most promising Canadian poet, and her poetry has gone on to win the National Magazine Award and the CBC Literary Award. Her first novel, The Sweet Edge, was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year. Alison Pick lives in Toronto.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page