These poems range from a personal evocation of Black Nova Scotian history to an intense, intimate response to world events in the last thirty years. All are "fugitive poems" evolving from 1979 to 1991.
Lasso the Wind is the first collection of children’s poetry by renowned poet and playwright George Elliott Clarke. By turns absurd, witty, playful, and profound, Clarke’s poems speak to the vivid wonder, the bright joys, and the secret pains of growing up in this world.
With fire, verve, and intensity, George Elliott Clarke gives readers a new work in which to immerse themselves - to feel illuminated by the cascading words and sensual experience of poetry.
Illicit Sonnets – a bawdy modern reboot of Sonnets from the Portuguese – tells of the love between Salim and Laila, an “elderessa”. Their highly-sexed romance, bridging cultures, generations and seas, is unfolded in poetry as sparkling and as shameless as champagne.
In the "Boogie Nights" era of the 1970s, Betty Browning and her lover, boxer Malcolm Miles, travel from the fog-anchored grime of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sunburnt Corpus Christi, Texas, and back — meeting tragedy and bloodshed along the way. I & I smoulders with love, lust, violence, and the excruciating repercussions of racism, sexism, and disgust. […]
This lyric collection by the acclaimed Nova Scotian poet, playwright, and librettist traces the contours of relationship in lush yet startling francophilic tones.
The poems in Gold glitter. From the lush, unrestrained and unabashed tumble and thrust of his sensual lyrics (vivid expressions of love and lust which brook no admonishment) to the measured and stately resonance of his eulogies for community organizers, tributes to leaders and laureates, and contemplations on the principles for good governance, George Elliott Clarke strives […]
By all accounts, the bludgeoning murder in 1949 of a taxi driver by brothers George and Rufus Hamilton was a "slug-ugly" crime. George and Rue were hanged for it. Repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins’ deeds, George Elliott Clarke uncovered a story of violence, poverty and shame—a story that led first to the Governor […]
Extra Illicit Sonnets chronicles a love affair between a man and a woman of different complexions, cultures, continents, and generations, Sonia Fuentes of Andorra and Luca Xifona of Canada. She is Spanish in heritage; and he is Maltese. She is a Boomer and he is of Generation Y-Not. The poetry consists mainly of unrhymed – or […]
In July 1949, George and Rufus Hamilton were hanged for the murder of a Fredericton, New Brunswick, taxi driver. These poems, written by their cousin, reimagine their story, reminding us of racism, poverty, and their brutal, tragic results.