Until the Light Bends [Paperback]

“A green and gorgeous keening, a testament to the solace of nature and of poetry.This powerful work is surely McMaster’s best and very moving.”

– Penn Kemp

“Susan McMaster is a fearless and passionate shaper of thought and feeling, and ofthe poetic language that animates. Until the Light Bends is required poetry.”

– Joseph Sherman

“McMaster’s ongoing concern with the cosmos turns inward in these poems, trackingthose moments when black holes open up within a life. Through a startling, disjunctivesyntax, her distinctive voice rises from the page and guides us throughdeaths, arguments, dreams, desires, to where we can see ‘wild green plums deepeningto blue.’

” – Stephanie Bolster

In times of loss and grief, we can feel that no one else has ever suffered as much, that somehow we've entered a special realm outside the ordinary round. And yet, we know every other person in the world must pass through some version of the same thing.

The first section of this book takes a clear-eyed, but gentle look at what is ordinary in the loss of a friend. While acknowledging the intensity of grief, it reaches for a way to move on. The second half expand this theme to include the other aspects of our lives that can seem so singular from inside, and so shared and human from a wider perspective. Many voices weave in and out through this section: jokes, dreams, nightmares, children, love, fear, leaving, return. Says poet Penn Kemp, "Until the Light Bends is a green and gorgeous keening, a testament to the solace of nature and of poetry. This powerful work is surely McMaster's best, and very moving. This writing is emblematic of sacred, physical realities ensconced in the daily. The poems capture the dance of response, the distraction of grief through all its intricacies, an extraordinary accomplishment."

Susan McMaster is a poet, artist, editor and feminist, well known in her native Ottawa where she grew up and studied at Carleton University. Susan is Editor-in-Chief of Vernissage, the magazine of the National Gallery of Canada, and is a member of the League of Canadian Poets and PEN. She has been invited to read across Canada and her work has been broadcast on such national shows as WordBeat, Go!, Richardsons Roundup, As It Happens, and Morningside. She was a founding member of the wordmusic group, First Draft, which performed in Ottawa and across Canada from 1981 to 1990, and she was the founding editor of the national feminist and literary magazine, Branching Out.