Launch date:
Saturday, November 30th, Salt Spring Island Public Library 7pm
If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb
co-winner of Exile’s 9th Gwendolyn MacEwen Best Suite of Poetry Award and National Magazine Award Finalist for Best Poetry
Lorraine Gane
Lorraine Gane’s If I Have Known Beauty is a brightly-spangled example of the essential conversations poets have with one another through their poetry. It is also a deeply moving tribute to her friend, the poet Phyllis Webb. What will fill the absence, Gane asks, knowing the only true possibility: the space you were / grows larger. These poems glide into that widening space like a long drawn out note of sweet music.
—Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain
Lorraine Ganes’ beautifully designed chapbook charts the poet’s journey through the loss of her beloved mentor and friend, Phyllis Webb. Each poem is a step through the Bardo of her own grief. Her poems, plain-spoken and lyrical, are as delicately woven as Webb’s treasured gift of a peacock scarf. Ghazal-like couplets “leap” from her original shock and anguish, as “waves of grief come and go,” echoing the Bardo’s passage from death to rebirth, and final acceptance of What Is.
—Wendy Donawa, author of Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions
Lorraine Gane was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. In the mid-seventies she graduated from Carleton University’s Honours Journalism Program, then worked as a full-time writer and editor for major Canadian newspapers and magazines until 1989, when she began freelancing. In the early nineties, she also started teaching writing at universities and colleges such as Ryerson, McMaster, and Georgian (later at Vancouver Island University and the University of Victoria), as well as conducting her own private workshops. Selections from Lorraine’s first poetry book, Even the Slightest Touch Thunders on My Skin (Black Moss Press, 2002), were shortlisted for the Canadian Literary Awards in 1997 and the League of Canadian Poets’ chapbook contest. Among her publications since moving to Salt Spring Island, B.C., in 1999, are the chapbooks Beauty and Beyond: Songs of Small Mercies and Arc of Light by Raven Chapbooks, and two more full-length volumes of poems, The Way the Light Enters (Black Moss Press, 2014) and The Blue Halo (Leaf Press, 2014). Her poetry sequence If I Have Known Beauty was co-winner of the 2023 Gwendolyn MacEwen Award and a finalist for the 2024 National Magazine Awards. Lorraine is completing a fourth poetry collection, among other books. She mentors writers through online courses, consultations, workshops, and manuscript editing.
ISBN: 978-1-7781603-7-0 | $20
Available at independent bookstores in your community, and by direct order through Raven Chapbooks: click here
