Selected Poems 1983–2020

Steven Heighton

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781487007386
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

This collection of new and previously published poems by Steven Heighton, author of the Governor General's Literary Award winner The Waking Comes Late, showcases a defining lyric poet of his generation.

Selected Poems 1983–2020 is Steven Heighton's seventh volume of poetry and the first since his Governor General's Literary Award–winning collection, The Waking Comes Late. Incorporating a grouping of previously unpublished poetry and a selection of key poems from his six previous acclaimed collections, this timely volume showcases a generational talent whose work has been described by critics as "exhilarating, " "genuine, " and "arrestingly beautiful."

Heighton's debut collection, Stalin's Carnival, won the Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 1990. Subsequent books, which include bestselling novels, essays, and critical writings, confirmed Heighton as an exciting and important voice in Canadian letters. Heighton's poetry is recognised for its technical skill and musicality, its erudition, and its empathy and unvarnished emotion.

The Waking Comes Late (2016)

The basic subject of poets is their own living body.

— Giórgos Seféris

Nor shall I care to write poetry that is not praise,
lamentation, or both.

— Stamátis Sm´yrlis

Inspired by a Line by Paul Celan

Betrink dich und nenn sie Paris

Each day I wake feeling I’ve already failed.

Tonight let’s get wrecked and call it Venice.

A woman I loved lied that she was healed

and for a night until waking, we were. I was born

with a mortgage, now show me the house, the home,

slip me the dose that’ll make me care less. I wake

each day feeling I’ve already torn

what I meant to rethread. (Did anything seem

in Eden, or was it all its own is?)

There was that woman, so enlisted in life,

one of passion’s true recruits, Love, I said,

I am so bad at loving, and the usual biz

ensued — scenes, loss and its isotopic

slow-fade, never done. On the deathbed of the skeptic

where he slept each night of his dying life

he said, It was hard having so little skin-to-skin

with the world—but look on my works!
with the world—but look on my works! Venice

is sinking, and it might be the case

it was never the key at all. Said a small voice

in the cirrus of a dream, Love is its own abode.

Not sure what it meant, though I think I knew once.

There is some cold road that you must renounce.

The Last Sturgeon

Deltawave shadows

of his deeds

and didn’ts, slid

under his shoes

like fillet knives, severing

soles from soil,

so he always walked

a little above his life,

not knowing it was

his life, while it waned

from waking-coma

to coma.
to coma. Came a land-

locked night

he dreamed that he’d

landed the last sturgeon in the world

and she looked bad —

shrunken, bludgeoned,

a blue-ribbed cat scan

of herself, her buckled

gills gawping,

a foam of green roe

welling from her mouth.

Each egg

was a tear, a tiny, entreating

vowel he couldn’t quite hear

as he cast round the boat (now morphing

into a mountain shack)

for water, the merest

rainpool, or glacial stream,

he panicked,

my dearest,

my loved one,

let me bear you back

to haven — by river

the ocean

is never far.

Variations on a Cranial Cat Scan Profile After a Laryngeal Fracture

Most intimate

of portraits, yet

clinically impersonal,

like a medschool textbook

graphic — cross-section

of a cadaver’s

head and throat — or

a silhouette embossed

on a dime or quarter,

the chilling silver

of some undead realm.

You cannot love this monster —

the werewolf rictus

of grated teeth, the side-seen eye’s

great, avid globe;

periscope esophagus, probing

up through the contused throat

as if to peer out

through the silenced mouth.

You might never speak again

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