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list price: $15.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Jan 1995
ISBN:9780889104716
publisher: Talonbooks

Aurora

by Sharon Thesen

tagged: canadian
Description

Loved and admired by readers for the grace of her language and the humanity of her vision, Sharon Thesen is one of Canada’s finest and most respected poets. Thesen’s poems express the pleasure and magic of a language fully transformed into visions of grace.

About the Author

Sharon Thesen

Poet, editor and teacher Sharon Thesen (born Tisdale, SK) has spent almost all her life in British Columbia. After studies at Simon Fraser University, she began teaching in 1975 at the then-Capilano College in North Vancouver, where for many years she edited The Capilano Review. Artemis Hates Romance, her first book of poetry in 1980, was followed by thirteen more, three of them finalists for the Governor General's Award: Confabulations, 1984; The Beginning of the Long Dash, 1987; and The Good Bacteria, 2006. She edited The Vision Tree, a selected poems by Phyllis Webb (Governor General’s Award, 1982), two editions of the The New Long Poem Anthology (1991 and 2001), and, with Ralph Maud, two volumes of correspondence between American poet Charles Olson and book-designer and Joyce scholar Frances Boldereff (1999 and 2012). At UBC Okanagan, where she taught from 2003 to 2012, Thesen and poet Nancy Holmes co-edited Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment. The Receiver (2017) is her most recent collection, and in 2021, The Wig-Maker was published, a book-length poem created in concert with Janet Gallant from Gallant’s memoirs. Since 2020, the annual “Sharon Thesen Lecture” at UBC Okanagan honours Thesen’s contribution to poetry and poetics. Her archives are held at the McGill University Library in Montreal and at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections in Burnaby, BC.
Contributor Notes

Sharon Thesen was born in Tisdale, Saskatchewan, in 1946. She moved to the British Columbia Interior in 1952 and lived in Prince George and Kamloops before settling in Vancouver in 1966. She is the author of several books of poetry and the former editor of the Capilano Review. She currently teaches English at Capilano College in North Vancouver and writes reviews for the Vancouver Sun.
Sharon Thesen is a poet, editor, and writer who was based in Vancouver, BC, before coming to UBC Okanagan in 2005. She is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent The Good Bacteria (House of Anansi). Her books include a selected poems, News & Smoke, and several titles from the 1980s and '90s from Coach House Press in Toronto.
Thesen has been involved in the Canadian and Vancouver poetry scene for many years. As an editor, she has published two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology, a Governor-General’s Award-winning edition of Phyllis Webb’s poetry (The Vision Tree), and, from 2001 to 2005, the literary and visual arts magazine The Capilano Review. She co-edited, with Ralph Maud, two sets of correspondence between the poet Charles Olson and book designer Frances Boldereff.
Sharon co-edits, with Nancy Holmes, Lake: a journal of arts and environment, which is housed in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, and continues to be a contributing editor of The Capilano Review.
Her book A Pair of Scissors won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and The Good Bacteria was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award, the ReLit Award and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Two earlier books also were finalists for the Governor-General’s Award, and in 2002 Sharon was a member of the jury, along with American poet Sharon Olds and Irish poet Michael Longley, for the prestigious Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry.
In addition to teaching literature and creative writing at Capilano College, Sharon has taught poetry workshops at a number of summer writing colonies, including the Banff Writing Studio, Echo Valley and St. Peter’s College, and for many years has informally mentored younger poets and writers. She has given readings at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, the Blue Metropolis Writers’ Festival in Montreal and the New Zealand Writers’ Festival in Wellington, NZ.
Sharon’s research interests are modern, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, lyric essay and philosophical autobiography, the relationship between poetic imagination and “the real,” and the Canadian long poem. She is also interested in the aesthetics of theological and mystical writings by women, as well as the relationship between psychology and ecology, and eco-poetics. She is married, with one son and one stepson. She lives in Lake Country, BC.

Editorial Review

Aurora is a wonderful book of light and dark daily things that flow outward into everything dark and light. In mind and heart and laughter, it’s big book, full of surprises. Poem by poem, like startling steps, a reader is led into the sequence ‘Gala Roses,’ where one hangs on for Dear Life.”
– Robin Blaser

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