- Omens in the Year of the Ox
- Steven Price
- 1-926829-76-X
- 978-1-926829-76-0
- 103
- 2012
- 6" × 9"
- $19.00
to buy with PayPal or a Credit Card
Cover art:
Cover design by Michel Vrana.
Listen to Poems from Omens in the Year of the Ox
Omens, curses, the reading of entrails: means of grappling
with what is out of our hands, beyond our ken.
Steven Price’s second collection is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from a Greek-style chorus of clever-minded, mischievous beings—half-ghost, half-muse—whose commentaries tormentingly egg the writer on. In poems that range from free verse to prose to formal constructions, Price addresses the moral lack in the human heart and the labour of living with such a heart. Yet the Hopkins-like, sonorous beauty of the language reveals “grace and the idea of grace everywhere, in spite of what we do.” The pleasures of Price’s musicality permeate confrontation with even the darkest of human moments; the poems thus surreptitiously remind us that to confront our own darkness is one of the divine acts of which humans are capable.
"There is a poetic adroitness here so knowing that it often hits you only afterward how deliciously chosen each syllable has been... [Price's] technique allows him frequently to achieve what all artists dream of: the virtual disappearance from our awareness of the subtle technical intricacies that are unfolding there... it must have felt like this when TS Eliot came on the scene." - The Globe & Mail (on Anatomy of Keys)
The Proust Questionnaire: Steven Price
Steven Price On Beauty
Day 1: West Coast poet Steven Price - Literary Press Group's National Poetry Month Project - April 1, 2013
More Brick Books by Steven Price
- Anatomy of Keys (2006)
Reviews
- Retail 2012: Brick Books by Jacob McArthur Mooney (Vox Populism, February 3, 2012)
- Omens in the Year of the Ox by Alexis Kienlen (Quill & Quire, April 2012)
- Poet’s newest work a darkly satisfying collection by Colin Holt (Victoria Times Colonist, June 10, 2012)
- Brave, restless poems found in White Fields by Bill Robertson (Saskatoon StarPhoenix, June 2, 2012)
- Omens in the Year of the Ox by Steven Price by Candace Fertile (Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue #12, May - August 2012 )
- Omens in the Year of the Ox by Melanie Kindrachuk (The Indextrious Reader, December 11, 2012)
- Notable book-lovers share their best reads of the year by Lorna Crozier (Globe and Mail, December 29, 2012)
- Omens in the Year of the Ox by Steven Price by Devin Pacholik (Global TV Regina, January 15, 2013)
- Omens in the Year of the Ox - Steven Price by Devin Pacholik (Pages and Patches blog, January 15, 2013)
- Omens in the Year of the Ox by Steven Price by Nikki Reimer (Event, 41.3, winter 2013)
