Shane Rhodes | The Bindery

October 7th, 2008

Bindery

Shane Rhodes

Please click on the cover to enlarge.

This third collection from acclaimed poet Shane Rhodes is full of poems to be felt, to be underlined, to be whispered, to be dog-eared and talked about. Tracing themes of travel, love, personal and collective history, “The bindery” combines lyrical poetry with experimental verve. These poems were composed from hurried scribbles in Mexican bus stations, meditations on street corners in Buenos Aires, letters from friends in the Himalaya, and odes from the Canadian hinterland, and emphasise how “to be stained by what we see”.

“Before his first collection appeared, what I saw of Rhodes’ work was made up of “great lines in good poems,” and, with each new publication, has steadily improved. Rhodes has always managed to maintain a loosely-restrained lyric, pulling between that and the underlying (barely contained) energy that runs through his lines, but the pieces in The Bindery are far more refined, and fuse the two far better than anything he has accomplished previously.” — Rob McLennan, April 10, 2007.

Shane Rhodes has published poetry, essays and reviews in magazines, journals and newspapers across Canada. He has also had work broadcast on CBC Radio One’s Definitely Not the Opera, Between the Covers and This Morning. He has been an editor with The Fiddlehead, filling Station and Qwerty. Shane won the Alfred G. Bailey Award and the Alberta Book Award for Poetry for his first collection, The Wireless Room. His second book, holding pattern, was published in Spring 2002 by NeWest Press. Check out Shane’s chapbook, tengo sed, published by Greenboathouse in 2004.