In The Shape of a Throat, her second collection of poetry, Sheila Stewart is deeply attuned to the process of unearthing childhood memory and mapping the landscape of midlife. She meanders along High Park trails and carefully observes scenes in Toronto subways and cafés, as she wrestles with the complexity of having grown up in the United Church manse in small-town Ontario and living a writing life with a partner and teenaged children. She charts a path through a disquiet childhood, letting dreams and the unconscious shape her knowing. Her lyrical command creates a space for the reader to meditate, too, on the longing inherent in the relationships between self and other people and between self and nature. She asks, "What does it mean to take another / into you?"
Reflecting on the contours and im/possibilities of poetry, Stewart reveals the vulnerability needed to create new images and symbols. Her poetry will startle your senses and disrupt your sense of self. Stewart's work captures "the smell of ginger root, roasting garlic, crushed cardamom, the taste of nutmeg, the trouble with memory, a writer's unreliability, the lie of the lake. The Shape of a Throat's is a compelling mix of tenderness and power.
About the Author: Sheila Stewart's first collection of poetry, A Hat to Stop a Train, was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2003. She also co-edited The Art of Poetic Inquiry (Backalong Books, 2012). Her work has been recognized by numerous literary awards, including the GritLit Poetry Competition, Scarborough Arts Council, Pottersfield Portfolio Short Poem Competition, Dan Sullivan Memorial Prize, and the Ray Burrell Award for Poetry. She has been widely published in such journals as The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, Grain, Descant, and The New Quarterly.
Stewart grew up in Stratford, Waterloo, and Montreal, taught in Libya and Swaziland, and worked in community-based adult literacy in Parkdale. She lives near High Park in Toronto, and is completing a poetic PhD at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.
