I really have a grandmother, you see; all these years I've kept her in the trunk upstairs with most of that other old stuff: the yellowed lace, photo albums, roses dusted in ancient summers. (Mary E. Choo, "A Tale for Pandora")
Eighteen years after Judith Merril introduced Canadian readers to speculative poetry in the first of the groundbreaking Tesseracts science fiction anthologies, poet and editor Sandra Kasturi has further expanded the poetry horizon. With a foreward by John Rose, introduction by Phyllis Gotlieb and afterword by James Morrow, Kasturi's new speculative poetry anthology The Stars as Seen from this Particular Angle of Night covers a broad spectrum. James Morrow, in his afterword, calls the thirty- one genre poems in this collection "The Pangalactic Poetry Circus"..."whose ambition is to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar." The striking cover painting by visionary Czech artist Vaclav Vaca, "Cosmic Egg", reflects this intersection of the fabulous and real.
In her introduction, Phyllis Gotlieb observes, "Here, in these forty-two poems, "children and elephants fall from space, three ships sail into hell's mouth, twisted time marries crippled distance, wolves fly with frost in their hair and flesh in their teeth...."
Sandra Kasturi, who began to gather these poems as early as 1995, says "There is an enormous amount of truly amazing speculative poetry (to use the collective term) out there, both formal and informal... lyrical, precise, eloquent, sharp and edgy, quiet and moving. What I very much wanted to demonstrate with this collection is that ... what can be considered genre poetry does not have to fit into rigid guidelines." Peter Straub describes the collection as "...sheer spinning invention, genuine passion, (with) many points of view, none of them comfortable or conventional." And Robert Priest cautions, "Read with care. Contains condensed whimsy, speculation, fabulation and possibly prophecy. May explode in the mind."
The Stars As Seen from this Particular Angle of Night (Red Deer Press/The Bakka Collection) includes poetry from Canadians Colleen Anderson, Peter Bloch-Hansen, Mary E. Choo, Carolyn Clink, David Clink, Donna Farley, Phyllis Gotlieb, Barry Hammond, Eileen Kernaghan, Susan A. Manchester, Yves Meynard, John Park, Kathy Shaidle, Heather Spears, Jason Taniguchi, and Carleton WIlson, as well as U.S., British and Australian poets. It's a trade paperback published by Red Deer Press/Bakka Books (ISBN 0- 88995-280-9, Can. 12.95/USA 9.95) and can be ordered from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.