Bindery (The)

Spring 2007

Paperback 112 pages

Poetry

Winner of the 2008 Lampman-Scott Award for Poetry

"The metaphorical leaps, the paratactic contingencies in these poems reinforce not only the affective materiality of travel in unfamiliar places but also the difficulty with which language travels to and from the referent—the words we bind and that bind us. The Bindery is Rhodes’ third book and builds on the considerable accomplishments of his earlier works The Wireless Room and Holding Pattern. This is a book worth taking along on any trip." Canadian Literature   Click here for the full review.

This third collection from award-winning poet Shane Rhodes takes off in full flight from where his other books left off. Tracing concurrent themes of travel, love, personal and collective history, all in a rich multifaceted style unique to Rhodes, The Bindery combines moving lyrical poetry with experimental verve. One of the main sections of the book is a series of prose poems based on travels through Latin America where we are taken from the Conquistadores to the Mexican revolution, and all the way to the present and shop-keepers in Mexico City. Other poems in the book look at travel to India, Argentina, and across Canada through language, history, and collected stories. The title poem of the book, a remarkable long poem, is a rich collage of lyrical and prose poems with haiku, philosophical meditations, aphorisms, and photographs.

The Bindery is a collection of hurried scribbles in Mexican bus terminals, meditations on street corners in Buenos Aires, letters from friends in the Himalaya, and odes from the Canadian hinterland. The book’s emphasis is on how to live and travel in a life bound-up with language and history, how to read the present through the past, how to be awake in the world and, as one poem states, how “to be stained by what we see.”