Selected Poems 1983–2020

By Steven Heighton

This collection of new and previously published poems by Steven Heighton, author of the Governor General’s Literary Award winner The Waking Comes Late, showcases a defining lyric poet of his generation.

Selected Poems 1983–2020 is Steven Heighton’s seventh volume of poetry and the first since his Governor General’s Literary Award–winning collection, The Waking Comes Late. Incorporating a grouping of previously unpublished poetry and a selection of key poems from his six previous acclaimed collections, this timely volume showcases a generational talent whose work has been described by critics as “exhilarating,” “genuine,” and “arrestingly beautiful.”

Heighton’s debut collection, Stalin’s Carnival,won the Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 1990. Subsequent books, which include bestselling novels, essays, and critical writings, confirmed Heighton as an exciting and important voice in Canadian letters. Heighton’s poetry is recognised for its technical skill and musicality, its erudition, and its empathy and unvarnished emotion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781487007386

Steven Heighton

Steven Heighton (1961–2022) was a writer and musician. His nineteen previous books include the novels Afterlands, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, and the bestselling The Shadow Boxer; the Writers' Trust Hilary Weston Prize finalist memoir Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos; and The Waking Comes Late, winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry.

Book preview

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Praise for Steven Heighton

Heighton is an experienced adventurer in literary form . . . A sense of boldness and risk-taking infuses [his work]. — New York Times Book Review

Deservedly won a Governor General’s Award . . . Richly rewarding on repeated reading . . . The poems are by turns angry, elegiac, or simply intoxicated with wordplay and the intricacy of assonance. — John Doyle, Globe and Mail, on The Waking Comes Late

A supremely cohesive and coherent performance . . . The poems speak to (or with) readers, a rare anomaly in these times . . . Heighton works (and plays) with words in wondrous ways few contemporary poets even dream of attempting, let alone conquering. — Judith Fitzgerald, Globe and Mail, on Patient Frame

Arrestingly beautiful and never banal . . . Authoritative and intoxicating . . . Stylistically and formally various . . . [Heighton] is a singer in an age-old tradition pursuing his serious craft. — Journal of Canadian Poetry on The Address Book

Simply the most exciting book of poetry published this year. — Globe and Mail on The Ecstasy of Skeptics

A sensitively conceived collection strong in poetic form, lyricism and emotion . . . A virtuoso performance. — Governor General’s Literary Award Jury Citation on The Ecstasy of Skeptics

Introduces a major new voice . . . Written in a style that is both elegant and free-flowing. — Montreal Gazette on Foreign Ghosts

A forgotten ur-text to so much of what Canadian poetry has become in the intervening quarter century since its publication . . . It would take another twenty-five years for Canadian poetry to catch up to the ambitious synthesis of sonic lushness and thematic unity that Heighton achieved in his first book.

— Michael Lista, National Post, on the re-issued Stalin’s Carnival

By the Same Author

poetry

Stalin’s Carnival

Foreign Ghosts

The Ecstasy of Skeptics

The Address Book

Patient Frame

The Waking Comes Late

fiction

Flight Paths of the Emperor

On earth as it is

The Shadow Boxer

Afterlands

Every Lost Country

The Dead Are More Visible

The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep

chapbooks/letterpresses

Paper Lanterns: 25 Postcards from Asia

The Stages of J. Gordon Whitehead

anthologies

A Discord of Flags: Canadian Poets Write about the Persian Gulf War (1991: with Peter Ormshaw & Michael Redhill)

Musings: An Anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature (2004: with

main editor Tess Fragoulis, & Helen Tsiriotakis)

nonfiction

The Admen Move on Lhasa

Workbook: memos

& dispatches on writing

Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos

The Virtues of Disillusionment

for young readers

The Stray and the Strangers

songs

The Devil’s Share

Title page: Selected Poems 1983–2020 by Steven Heighton. Edited by Karen Solie. Published by House of Anansi Press.

Copyright © 2021 Steven Heighton

Published in Canada in 2021 and the USA in 2021 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

House of Anansi Press and the author are grateful to publisher Aimée Parent Dunn for permission to reprint poems from Stalin’s Carnival. The first edition was published by Quarry Press (Kingston, ON) in 1989; the second edition was published by Palimpsest Press (Kingsville, ON) in 2013.

House of Anansi Press is committed to protecting our natural environment. This book is made of material from well-managed FSC®-certified forests and other controlled sources.

House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to students and readers with print disabilities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Selected poems 1983–2020 / Steven Heighton.

Other titles: Poems. Selections (2021)

Names: Heighton, Steven, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020034272X

Canadiana (ebook) 20200342754

ISBN 9781487007379 (softcover)

ISBN 9781487007386 (EPUB)

ISBN 9781487009212 (Kindle)

Classification: LCC PS8565.E451 A6 2021 | DDC C811/.54—dc23

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

Text design and typesetting: Laura Brady

House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

Logo: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

This book, like my first, is dedicated to John McEwen Heighton, who long ago walked me to the trailhead and gave me a compass, but refused to burden me with directions or a map.

Contents

Preface

Stalin’s Carnival (1989, re-issued 2013)

Early Poems, 1983–1986

Endurance

Sailing, Gulf Islands

A Perishable Art

Restless

High Jump

Inuksuk

The Machine Gunner

The Burned Out Slope

Invention

Nightmare

Ashes on the Earth: Selected Works of Josef Stalin

1. To the Moon

2. Elegy

3. On Reading Darwin

4. Ekaterina

6. Photograph of a Gutted Village, Georgia

7. Elegy in Early Winter

9. Two Elegies: A Son and a Colleague

11. O Poet, The Georgians Have Prepared For You a Monument In Heaven

12. Deathbed Dream

Foreign Ghosts (1990)

Departures

For Ping Hsin, in Golmud

Sky Burial

Fire Burial

The Braiding

Unfinished Buddha, Samed Island

Ceremony For Ancestors, Kōya San

Nakunaru

National Museum, Kyōto

The Ecstasy of Skeptics (1994)

Prologue

Birthday

Portrait of a Father

Elegy as a Message Left on an Answering Machine

Long Distance Every Sign

An Elegy, Years After Sarah

Conversation in a Gallery

Slow Lightning

In Heraclitus’s City

Rewriting the Dead

Glosa

The Bed (a letter)

Epitaph, Unfinished

Hikers

Psalm: For the Wind & the Shield Country

A Psalm, on Second Thought

Takayama (a dream in Japanese)

Stone Mountain Elegy

Were You to Die

The Ecstasy Of Skeptics

The Address Book (2004)

Address Book

The American Night Listens

The Wood of Halfway Through

Constellations

2001, An Elegy

From a Higher Window

Lost Waterfalls

Drunk Judgement

Maps of the Top of the World

The Last Living Speaker of the Arondha Tongue Caught on Video a Few Hours Before Her Death

English Cemetery, Gaspésie

Gravesong

Blackjack

The Peace Of High Places

The Shadow Boxers

The Mover

Like a Man

The Sleep at Sea

Patient Frame (2010)

Home Movies, 8 mm

Selected Monsters

Life!

You Know Who You Are

Constance & Her Stalkers

Some Other Just Ones

Things

Outram Lake

Two Tankas

Jetlag

Herself, Revised

The Last Reader

On a Change Of Address Card Sent a Few Weeks Before You Died

Kid Brother, Black October

Memo to a Self

Run With Her

Sky Burial, The Scholar

A Monsoon Suicide

Love Sonnet XVII

World Enough

The Waking Comes Late (2016)

Inspired by a Line by Paul Celan

The Last Sturgeon

Variations on a Cranial Cat Scan Profile After a Laryngeal Fracture

After The Cat Scan

Baffled in Ashdod, Blind in Gaza

Leningrad

The City

Wheat Town Beer Leaguer, Good Snapshot, No Backhand

A Cosmos

¡Evite Que Sus Niños . . .!

Untitled

Collision

All Rivers Arrive

The Weather Online

Untaken Turns

Song of the Graves

Trakl, 1913

Coronach, Post-Kandahar

Mikhaliós

In Order to Burn

The Minor Chords

June Cancellation

The Waking Comes Late

New Poems

Christmas Work Detail, Samos

Easter On The Salish Sea

Fake News

Akin to a Lizard

Better The Blues (Unplugged)

Prevéza

Dream Fragment

Night Skaters, Skeleton Park

Familial

Head of an Old Man With Curly Hair

Listen . . .

Ship’s Pilot Nagel

Dawn, After the Spring Suicides

Singing in the Grave

Midnight Variations

Notes

Acknowledgements: Magazines & Anthologies

Ledger of Thanks

About the Author

Preface

Until recently, if you’d bothered to ask me how I thought my poetry had changed over the past third of a century or so, I might have replied that two sources of inspiration have increasingly contributed to the work: dreams (usually in the form of lines overheard, so to speak, in sleep and transcribed on waking) and the practice of translating other poets.

But after reading through my six collections, then weighing in on Karen Solie’s triage as she selected the poems for this book, I see that my reply would have been wrong. Dream materials and the act of translation have nourished the work from the start. My first published poem, Nightmare, is a transcription of a dream — or, if I remember right, a kind of translation of imagery into verbal form. Another early poem, Restless, features a refrain translated (by means of a century-old, twenty-five-pound dictionary) from an Old Norse lyric I’ve never been able to find since. And the suite of poems at