The annual UVic Author Celebration is coming up as part of Ideafest. Join us as we celebrate authors from the UVic community who will read from their latest works.
When: March 7, 2019
Where: UVic Bookstore
Time: 2:00-4:00pm
The author panel includes: Jason M. Colby (History), Patrick Friesen (Writing), Bill Gaston (Writing), and Lynne Marks (History). Jim Forbes (Director of Campus Services) will host and Jonathan Bengtson (University Librarian) will moderate.
This week, we will highlight the books written by members of the author panel.
Songen by Patrick Friesen was released by Mother Tongue Publishing in 2018.
About the Book
The poems in this new collection move like swifts. They alight, but only briefly, before their smooth lifts and hair-trigger turns take us places we had not expected to go. Each poem, one sentence long and separated by commas, tracks the movement of the mind. Occasionally using words and phrases from Middle English and Low German, the poems touch on musical influences, the changes in language over the centuries and on the dissolutions, dilemmas and inevitabilities of old age. A beautiful body of work; the poet at his finest.
About the Author
Patrick Friesen, formerly of Winnipeg, now lives in Victoria. He writes poetry, essays, drama, song lyrics and text for dance and music; he has also co-translated several Danish poetry books with P. K. Brask. He has collaborated with various musicians, choreographers and dancers and has recorded CDs of text and improv music with Marilyn Lerner, Peggy Lee and Niko Friesen. He was short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award In Poetry in 1997, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in BC in 1998 and 2003, the Griffin Poetry Prize (a co-translation with Per Brask of Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments by Danish poet Ulrikka Gernes) in 2016, and the Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence in Poetry in 2016. He received the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award in Manitoba in 1996 and the ReLit Award for poetry in 2012. In 2018 his play A Short History of Crazy Bone was staged by Theatre Projects Manitoba.
Praise for the Book
“Patrick Friesen is a wide-ranging artist, devoted to film, music and the stage, but poetry always has been, and always will be, his devoir and his duty. Songen is a haunting suite of 86 meditations on the complexity of life inside the words we use to describe ourselves.”
— George Fetherling
“Patrick Friesen defies fashion and always sings. His language keeps invoking the condition of music: “any guile will do” as he hums an ode to the conjunctions, tunes for childhood and youth, jazz for death itself—on a ride cymbal with Max Roach. Friesen’s “voice/growing into landscape” maps the psychic territory in which we see the world.”
— Maurice Mierau
