Heidi Garnett
[Author Name]
Biography
Heidi Garnett graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from UBCO in 2010. Her poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies across Canada, the USA and in England. She was shortlisted for the $20,000 Mitchell Prize as well as in contests sponsored by Canada Writes, Rattle, Arc, Antigonish Review, CV2 and others. She won the Descant Winston Collins prize and was awarded the Timothy Findlay scholarship by Humber College for her fiction writing. Two poetry collections, Phosphorus and Blood Orange, have been published by Thistledown Press and Frontenac House. Heidi is presently completing a novel and editing a third poetry collection. www.heidigarnett.com
Poetics Statement
“I admire Carlos Williams’ famous wheelbarrow poem which takes the ordinary and transforms it into something extraordinary. For me, the thrill of writing poetry is this possibility of being inspired, of looking at something or someone as if for the first time, seeing it or them without imposing myself. Jan Zwicky in her book, Wisdom and Metaphor, calls this seeing-as. She writes: “ We see, simultaneously, similarities and dissimilarities. Time becomes meaningless.” Dare I say, when I’m truly inspired I experience a feeling of expansiveness, of entering a realm that’s beyond words. It’s as if I’m about to be offered a gift and, though I’m unsure who the giver is, I must be open to receiving it.”
Sample of Poet's Work
What Drifts In
The water draws back and leaves a fringe of detritus
on the beach: branches, plastic bags, a black and white
runner laces untied, shells, dead fish, things
husked out, emptied of life. I walk through the shallows
to the sandbank, the ocean’s shoulder, its muscularity
visible now, its rippled wet skin, and at the waterline
a flock of black and white birds, gulls perhaps,
flying as if connected by strands woven into a loose fabric
shaken out and about to unravel, gossamer
this collection of winged beings turning this way, then that,
black/white, black/white, semaphore, slight of hand,
a magic trick about to be exposed, but no. They hold,
this collection of feathers, of hollow bones
tracing a mobius ribbon in the air. They hold together
as one desire, one impulse to live, to fly as one mind,
one being. Icarus lifts into the air
and flies a sky with no sun or moon or stars,
a sky where only the heart can guide you.
If I Speak With the River
I must learn to breathe through my skin for the river is amphibious.
I must take shoes and clothes off and leave them on the bank
for nakedness is water’s first language. I must dive deep
into my grief and swim to the bottom of it where the dead sleep.
I must shake my mother awake and ask her if life is a dream
and death an awakening, but let us not talk about unknowable things.
What does God know of me and what do I know of him?
Mother braids my hair
with hands of smoke.
She plaits the strands
into scorched ropes and
ties them together
with ribbons of fire.
She wraps me in a wet sheet,
kisses me on the cheek
and cries, Run!