- The Truth of Houses
- Ann Scowcroft
- 1-926829-67-0
- 978-1-926829-67-8
- 104
- 2011
- 6" × 8.75"
- $19.00
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Cover art:
The cover image is by Geoffrey Bawa, courtesy of David Robson and the Geoffrey Bawa Trust.
e-book:
The e-book edition of this title will be available by the end of summer 2013.Listen to Poems from The Truth of Houses
Winner of the 2011 Concordia University First Book Prize, Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards
Shortlisted for the 2012 Award for People's Poetry (Acorn-Plantos Award Committee)
Poems exploring the idea of home and the difficulties of a deeply ambiguous relationship to that word.
At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft’s The Truth of Houses is an elegant debut collection. While very intimate—even startlingly intimate at times—the voices of these poems are constantly taking a step backward, wrestling for a measure of distance and perspective. Reading them, we eavesdrop on the uncovering of a personal vernacular that might allow the present to be better lived; we have the sense of overhearing a particular yet eerily familiar inner struggle—a struggle for insight, for an equanimity with which both narrator and fortunate reader might re-enter life anew.
All of which is to say: the houses aren’t fooled
the houses know the five truths
The truth of light: you will see before you understand
The truth of motion: escape is an illusion
The truth of trees: your busy life will dissolve into the soil
The truth of windows: what protects can also maim
The truth of peace:
despite all the other truths
knowing will come to you wearing one hundred faces
contain you as once you contained your
own blood
—from “The Truth of Houses”
“These are poems filled with the intricacies of life – subtle and human, anarchic and generous, intimate as well as far ranging in their time and geography. The Truth of Houses is a wonderful first collection of poems.” -- Michael Ondaatje
Winner of the 2011 Concordia University First Book Prize, Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards
About The Truth of Houses by Ann Scowcroft, the jurors wrote:
“Ann Scowcroft’s first collection of poems astounds with its dense writing, as if the author had been accumulating, constructing her vision long enough and could hold back no longer. Oddly mesmerising in the imagery they provoke, these poems are at once intimate and universal.”
Reviews
- Retail 2011: Brick Books by Jacob McArthur Mooney (Vox Populism, January 16, 2011)
- POETRY: Robin Robertson mines sacrifice, regret by Ariel Gordon (Winnipeg Free Press, April 23, 2011)
- Speaking unspoken truths by Sonnet L’Abbé (Globe and Mail, April 27, 2011)
- BIBLIO-FILE: The Truth of Houses by Ann Scowcroft by Suzanne Hancock (Radio Canada International, April 27, 2011)
- The Truth of Houses by Alyse Bensel (NewPages Book Reviews, August 2, 2011)
- Jurors' Comments by 2011 Concordia University First Book Prize (Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards)
- The Truth of Houses by Melanie Kindrachuk (The Indextrious Reader, Sunday, November 27, 2011)
- Natalie Schembri reviews The Truth of Houses by Natalie Schembri (The Beat Magazine - December 3, 2011)
- Maria Meindl recommends The Truth of Houses by Ann Scowcroft by Maria Meindl (Advent Book Blog, December 16, 2011)
- The Truth of Houses by Ann Scowcroft by Anne Burke (Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, January 2012)
- Building the Forests and Meadows of the Human Heart by Deborah Bowen (The Goose, issue 11, 2012, pages 87-89)
