REVIEWS
Once a Murderer makes Editor’s Choice in The Vancouver Sun!
Read Barbara Carey’s review in The Toronto Star
Marilyn Bowering, Writer, 2008 Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Creative Writing at New York University:
“This is wonderful poetry, infused with unfamiliarity despite our media familiarity with murder and police culture: the grit of crime grinds against the imagery of forbidden love, of mountains, sea and flowers…. I don’t know whether this is part novel or a dystopic pastoral, but Landale shows how a violent context defines and diminishes even as we reach for whatever there is of love among the ruins and margins. I read this work compulsively.”
excerpt, poem
PORTRAIT OF AN INVESTIGATOR
He is air after a thunderclap, the way
he tries to own her
it spreads and parts, still reeling through touch
from collision.
The faint scent of shaving cream presses her to his chest
mostly washed off.
Tough and cheerful, a high
hardhack tangle rooted into hardpan;
indigenous, won’t let go
a person could never dig him out.
She doesn’t get around him. Only massive charm
or honesty works as Open sesame; police never give
information, only take
even then she has to be fast
to see how he stares most things back.
If he was a bird, he’d be a peregrine
His burden the terror of victims
the last half hour before a violent death.
she doesn’t ask,
ever
Its weight, a corroded ring,
threaded through a chain about his neck.
He spends months questioning
the innocent and the tarnished,
teasing out who his corpse was, really.
Then the exhilaration of swoop, he lives
for this rush
the seizure of a murderer.
When he’s been by, moments later
she’s still dislocated
by the turbulent swirl of wings. pinions creak through air
like a gate to the mysteries
opening
Cbc poems from enRoute, pdf fprmat. This won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2003 and was published in En Route magazine
Want to read more? Here’s a Once a murderer pdf whole book.
If you like it, you might want to visit your local bookstore or chapters/indigo for a hard copy.
