• Title: I see my love more clearly from a distance
• Author: Nora Gould
• ISBN: 1-926829-75-1
• ISBN-13: 978-1-926829-75-3
• Pages: 111
• Year: 2012
• Size: 6" × 9"
• Price: $19.00

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Listen to Poems from I see my love more clearly from a distance

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Winner of the 2013 Robert Kroetsch Edmonton Book Prize

Shortlisted for Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Writers Guild of Alberta)

Unromantic poems examining life, love, illness, and death
on a ranch on the hard grass prairie.

In Nora Gould’s one-of-a-kind debut, the Prairie itself is a central character: muse, mythic persona, the place of deepest solace and of deepest questioning. The poems focus with great firmness and technical command on the facts of daily life on the farm: impregnating cows, the neighbour kid picking off a coyote, cutting hay, getting water to the herd in a drought, dehorning. But Prairie anecdotalism this ain’t. What is breathtaking about this book is the relation between its exactness of observation and the grief, horror, and beauty that it documents. What the voice achieves, in its very gestures, is a kind of transcendence: not with the purpose of avoiding pain, but in order to make all of it—all of it—seeable and feelable by a human being.

“Fear,” as Gould says “resides in anticipation and in the afterwards, the what-might-have-been and the badger of again.” In the white light of the now, there is no room for it, there is room only for concentration, a precise surgical rendering of details, so that we may sense everything else—the unspeakable—disposing itself in the space around that blaze of attention.

“Uninterested in simplistic lyrical escape, [Gould] can be as dry as a wheat field without rain, as rich as the biopsy of a cancer cell, complete with fallen fruit and pickle-making. I see my love more clearly from a distance is a fresh way of looking at what’s not always regarded, a journal of intensity lived – tough and ambrosial – the land as it is when recorded by a fearless voice.”

– Brian Brett author of Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life (Douglas & McIntyre, 2009), winner of the 2009 Writers’ Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize and BC Booksellers’ Choice Award  

Nora Gould is the winner of the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize!! - April 29, 2013

Here are 2 poems of Nora’s from this book.

Poetry, ranch life and relationships: An interview with Nora Gould - Nora Gould is a poet and rancher from Alberta and her debut poetry collection I see my love my clearly for a distance is prairie poetry beyond pretty landscapes; brighter than golden wheat fields, and at times darker than long winter nights. She brings to life animal, vegetable and mineral and honours the beauty of the prairies without sentimentality. She is equally unsentimental about her life: family dynamics, her children, marriage, endometriosis. The landscape of the prairies and the landscape of her life as it intersects with the land is full and vivid and emotionally astute. Her writing hides little from view, words strung together with no fear, baring all.

For the full article, go here.

Poets in Profile - Nora Gould on Open Book: Ontario - "I've gone to Joel's / to boil deer skulls / love Farley" writes rancher and poet Nora Gould. The poems in her debut collection, I see my love more clearly from a distance, just published with Brick Books, are always surprising, haunting and bold. It is "a journal of intensity lived," says Brian Brett, "tough and ambrosial — the land as it is when recorded by a fearless voice."

Today, she tells us about the poetry in her genes, a mysteriously bruised shoulder and the secrets in the stance of cattle.

For the full interview, go here.

new knowing - "I see my love more clearly from a distance" BC Book Tour - July 5, 2012 - interview and commentary on Nora Gould and her first poetry collection here