Poems by Ev Bishop

Why Poetry?

/ Ev Bishop / 1 Comment

The Heart is a Muscle is born! Cue party poppers and happy dancing—and cringing and whinging.

While I’m mostly used to new book releases (though I’m still stoked and in awe every time I complete a book and share it with the world), I wasn’t prepared for the extreme nervousness that’s holding hands with my happiness today.

Sharing my writing always feels slightly scary (and used to feel utterly terrifying), though I’m one of those lucky people who has a good game face and can generally seem at ease with everything. And over the years, sharing my novels has gotten easier: all the fun, waaaaay less of the fear and anxiety. Sharing my first poetry collection, however? Eeek. It feels very vulnerable. And maybe that’s the point. Being a human is very vulnerable.

Life is complex, and I’ve found that in order to survive it, I’ve had to make peace with and hold a lot of contradictory emotions. And poetry helps.

If you’re familiar with my novels, you know that the rub of human existence is a theme I explore often: how joy and deep, profound, incredible beauty coexists with horrible things and excruciating experiences and situations. The poems that I, Angie Dorsey, and Nancy Davies chose for The Heart is a Muscle grew out of that coexistence as well, and as its longer title promises, throughout its pages, in various forms and ways, light and dark, we explore love, pain (though, in hindsight, perhaps grief would’ve been a more apt word), healing, and joy.

It’s that last state—joy—that really speaks to me now. As a younger poet, it was always pain, hardship, and rage—my own and that of the world at large—that fueled my pen. I still feel those emotions (and myriad others) deeply, and denying them or trying to avoid them is impossible (and arguably, unhealthy), but more and more it’s the light side of the shadows—that I also feel so, so intensely and am so grateful for—that I long to somehow portray, share, explore.

And on that note, I excitedly (and yep, still trepidatiously) present of our collection of poems about just some of the experiences and emotions of being human. I so hope you enjoy our offerings!

You can find The Heart is a Muscle in eBook from the from the vendor of your choice here.

It is also available widely in paperback and will soon be winging its way to Misty River Books!

And if you’d like a signed copy, please reach out to me at ev_bishopATSIGNyahoo.com. I’d love to sell you one and ship it to you personally. ❤️

A Poem On Summer Solstice

/ Ev Bishop / Leave a comment

DSC04644In honour of Summer Solstice (a wet, delicious smelling day!) I’d like to share a poem I wrote a few years back. Special thanks to Noreen Spence, a beyond amazing artist and a truly kind, creative soul, who is so good at reminding me that I . . . write poems. I was flattered she remembered it and appreciated her gently prodding me to share it.

I hope you have your own grey and green world to revel in!

– – – – – – – – – – – – – –

My World is Grey and Green

Soft grey light
Diffused through smoke-like clouds
Around me,
The colour green abounds
leaves – trees – grasses – bush and shrub
Green inadequately describes –

verdure stretching up through dirt
prickly, punishing conifers
the amber cushion; moss
greyish shade of dew soaked clover
antiqued metal
the filigree of tubercles on birch bark –

We use colour to describe things
red bench – blue bike – brown house – orange kite

We use things to describe green
leaf green – grass green – olive green – apple green –
emerald green – sea green – bottle green – pea green

The screen of sky behind my green is flat
motionless, homogeneous –
As if a giant carefully clipped and pasted
my world onto grey construction paper:

3-D green on grey

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

“My World is Grey and Green” Copyright Ev Bishop

“Are you nobody too?” – Emily Dickinson

/ Ev Bishop / 3 Comments

Prompted by the question, “If someone said they liked to read “vaguely romantic” poetry, whose work might that be?” posted in a writing forum I frequent, I started going through my head for poets I love/have loved and poems that have moved me.

The first names that popped to my mind were Sarah Teasdale, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Al Purdy–and one line, “A girl freezes in a telephone booth” (which comes from beautiful, if ripping, untitled poem by Andrei Voynesensky).

Then I turned to a hardcover journal that I got when I was sixteen or so. It holds favourite poems and quotes from my teen years, transposed from the various scraps of paper and spiral notebooks that the words had previously called home, along with passages and snippets that have resonated with me in later years. I’m slightly in awe of how much poetry I used to read–and by the poets I gravitated to, long before I knew they were “somebodies” in the literary world.

While I’m a fiction addict, there’s something about poetry that calls to me and speaks to me in a way that no other written form does. I wonder if it’s because poems are created with the words we find within ourselves when all other words fail us?

I don’t consider it a great work of art or anything, but I had fun with the following poem late last fall and feel satisfied that I captured, at least in part, the mood of that evening. It’s also nice now, in the heart of winter, to remember there are always aspects of deep weather that I enjoy.

Winter’s Eve

All is crinkly-crisp this night
Golden leaves are icy folds—wrinkled, whiskered
Street lamps glow and show
Grassy-green, silver-sheened
Underfoot, crushed mint
Overhead, elf-wine scent
Mountain ash berries ferment

Clear sky
Cold sky
Black with star eyes

Woodsmoke sighs
It won’t snow yet

                                    – Ev Bishop, copyright 2009

 I hope you’re digging into the words within you this week. And if you can’t find a story, seek out a poem.