In this new collection, Colin Browne approaches the narratives of history, memory, and place as sites of occupation. The writing is urgent and reflective, often autobiographical, advancing by means of juxtaposition and montage to probe the embers of the past lying unextinguished in the present. "Here" is a condition, a vortex of archaic desire flooded by the moon of memory. Among the imagined and terrestrial topographies are the Highlands of Scotland, the British Columbia Interior, Paris, Vancouver Island, Central America, Tokyo, Walden Pond, the Northwest Coast, and Raymond Roussel's Timbuktu. Alternately dismayed, humbled, bemused, confessional, rueful, funny, topical, and propelled by a polyrhythmic score in a field of intertextual voices, Here is infused with Browne's current research and includes autobiographical narratives, translations, conversations, chance discoveries, a modest libretto, accounts of his grandparents, documentary fragments, and a suite of improvisational prose texts with the immediacy of a daybook. Ear is arbiter. Composed serially, every page of Here takes on the nature of a loom, with the pattern of the whole yet to be discerned.
About the Author: Colin Browne has published five volumes of poetry. His most recent publications are Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw (Talonbooks, 2016) and The Hatch: Poems and Conversations (Talonbooks, 2015). His books have been nominated for a Governor General's Award and the Dorothy Livesay Award / B.C. Poetry Prize. He is a celebrated filmmaker; his experimental documentary White Lake was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Feature Documentary. His recent exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia (2016), explored the brief encounter between these two Modernist artists in Victoria, B.C., in August 1939, and presented the first extensive exhibition of Paalen's work in Canada. His collaboration with composer Alfredo Santa Ana, Music for a Night in May, was presented at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in May 2018. Recent essays exploring the links between Surrealism and the art of the Northwest Coast have appeared in exhibition catalogues in the U.S. and Europe. He is currently working on new curatorial projects and preparing a collection of essays for publication. Until recently, he taught in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he is Professor Emeritus.