The Porcupine's Quill
Celebrating forty years on the Main Street
of Erin Village, Wellington County
BOOKS IN PRINT
Taking Shape by Edward Carson
A collection of poems about love and how it touches all aspects of our lives. Never flinching from truth, Edward Carson demonstrates all the brutal honesties and shapes of his subject. Love, too, comes in a multitude of shapes which we learn to sometimes embrace, and sometimes repel.
Taking Shape is about love, its powerful personal history, its public geography and geology, how it changes, how it shifts itself into different forms and temporalities, and how love profoundly alters an individual’s point of view and the world at large.
Through love we belong to, and are separate from each other in ways like no other parts and phases of our existence; through it the language of our imaginations are nourished and transformed. Like nature’s elusive electrons, the paths love takes are continually altered and given new direction by the knowledge, questions and feelings we bring to it.
Finally, Taking Shape is also about the nature of shape, how the very form or vessel, like language itself, persuades us to take on as well as escape from the many breathtaking landscapes and mysteries, clues and possibilities of our shared lives.
2009—ReLit Award,
Long-listed
Unpublished endorsement
‘With evocative imagery and the keen eye of a photographer, Carson gives shape to a language of the heart.’
—Christopher Dewdney
Unpublished endorsement
‘Within Ed Carson’s grave meditation on love we can hear sounding the ghost of our old, stately, inexhaustible pentameter. As his measured words resonate and rhyme, accumulating weight, so do his ideas. This is mature poetry that appeals to both the heart and the head -- accomplished, thoughtful, and moving.’
—Keith Maillard
Unpublished endorsement
‘Edward Carson’s Taking Shape is a subtle meditation on love and change, lovers caught up in the changes and rhythms of life on this mortal earth. The elegant couplets repeat phrases, words, and images to hypnotic effect. In a manner reminiscent of E. D. Blodgett’s Apostrophes -- yet entirely its own -- Taking Shape in its play on repetition and variation traces ‘‘the faint / shape of things taking shape,’’ evoking the weather of love.’
—Hilary Clark
Unpublished endorsement
‘Edward Carson’s Taking Shape is a feast of immanent thinking. It shows that time-worn tools can indeed, when used with patience, sensitivity, rigour, and devotion, yield pleasures rare and contemporary.’
—Mark Truscott
Unpublished endorsement
‘Ed Carson’s Taking Shape is a gem. In this new book of interconnected poems, in an attempt to name what love is, to give it a shape that can be grasped, like a metaphysical lapidarist he facets and re-facets its language so that the light it reveals refracts and reflects within it and ‘‘exceeds its reason for being’’. We come away believing in the shape of something with no shape at all.’
—Brian Henderson
Unpublished endorsement
‘Ed Carson’s linked poems, Taking Shape, rising and falling in easy cadences, examine how things take shape in the world. Yet for all their fluidity, these poems have a blade-sharp edge. Showing us ‘‘held together in a fierce ring of light’’, they reveal, poignantly, what it is that makes us human.’
—Anne Simpson
Unpublished endorsement
‘Edward Carson’s linked poems praise at once the logic of love and the place of love. Taking Shape combines his elegance of style and imagination (think of a musical composition) with the immediacy of the erotic. A rare performance.’
—Robert Kroetsch
Unpublished endorsement
‘Love, the argument goes, is not a force that can be contained: Ed Carson’s poems don’t attempt to bind the un-bindable -- they approximate love’s flavour, turning outward to the other and inward to the self, and also wandering among love’s mysteries. This meditation on love over time rewards re-reading: the reach for the divine is threaded through with human failings: these strike me as not only graceful, but truthful poems.’
—Marilyn Bowering
Unpublished endorsement
‘Like ocean tides these words pull and push our logic, hearts and spirit into a communion of evolving spaciousness. Taking Shape is powerful and provocative.’
—Lucinda M Vardey
Edward Carson is twice winner of the E. J. Pratt Poetry Award in Canada, and is the author of a previously published book of poetry, Scenes. Over the past thirty years he has pursued a variety of careers involving the word, including co-founder/editor of the literary periodical, Rune, and lecturer in English Literature at the University of Toronto. He has served as president of several major book publishing companies, including Penguin Group (Canada), Pearson Technology Group Canada, Distican (Simon and Schuster), HarperCollins Canada, and, while head of publishing, founded the successful indigenous publishing list of Random House of Canada.
Throughout his publishing career he taught the business of publishing at Ryerson University, Humber College, and as co-director of the Banff Publishing Workshop. He also has participated on various Boards of Directors, including PEN Canada, BookNet Canada, and is a past president of the Canadian Publishers’ Council. At present he is Chief Business Officer and Associate Director, University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies.
The Porcupine's Quill would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) is also gratefully acknowledged.
