CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN POETRY BOOKS OF 2022 hwaet, another Beowulf
translation? Not exactly... Welcome to Denmark's Heorot Hall, where
King Hrothgar invites to his banquet table everyone but Grendel,
Saxon's cradle-made monster. Dissing this ur-outsider initiates a
predictable and monstrous backlash, a Mediaeval fracas that only
the eponymous Beowulf can quash. Sailing across the whaleroads, he
arrives to "quell and queltch and quatch the Grendel beast."
Beowulf, that still-recognizable hero, embodies a "blank" function,
a motive-driven yet motiveless megastar. He's the young, fit, male,
self-sacrificing protagonist-interloper who will fight any monster
to protect his people. Or to defend strangers. Or to gain a
reputation. Or because he just really wants to... In her rendering
of Beowulf, Nicole Markotic offers a rollicking cover song of
fantastical text. These pages will surprise readers as they
introduce new ways to embrace, challenge, or click with Anglo-Saxon
heroics. Writing original poems, Markotic de-stories the story of
one man, who mostly does not play well with others, who fights
monsters (and defeats their mothers, too), and who practically
invents the poetic tradition of entitled bravery. Upending the tale
with her fresh and enchanting style, Markotic gives a nod to
previous translations, winks at canonical critics, bares historical
biases, all while gifting transmogrifying pages that will whet your
whimsy! "Nicole Markotic takes the original English-language epic
and reprocesses it. That is, she rereads, rewrites, reimagines,
rethinks, and retells it, all at the same time. The result is the
story re-understood. The phrasing and incantation is Markotic's own
(and our era's own), deployed with deliciously textured and diverse
registers of language. Blake saw infinity in the palm of his hand.
Markotic puts a millennium in yours." -Wayde Compton, author of The
Outer Harbour "Beowulf, with its unfathomable monsters and
monster-slaying hero, its bro world of mead, boasting, weapons, and
booty, remains a stubbornly relevant template for much of our
contemporary scene. Nicole Markotic's After Beowulf handles all
this with dazzling sprezzatura. It is a pleasure to follow the
narrating, condensing, commenting voice as it sashays through a
range of verbal registers from high Olsonic to comic book pratfall,
snark to scholarship. After Beowulf provides an up-to-date reading
of Beowulf through the eyes of a feminist poet. And it continually
suggests what things might be like after Beowulf." -Bob Perelman,
author of Jack and Jill in Troy "The collision of ancient and
colloquial language creates bursts of humour as my dude Beowulf
makes his way into the banquet hall and beyond. Linger here to
experience the aesthetics of poetry in action: vibrant and
intensely moving, we feel the wrenching pain of Grendel's mother.
Markotic's language is thick with meaning and light with humour: a
creation of the most projective of verses." -Jacqueline Turner,
author of Flourish
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