The Bells That Ring

Many of Lisa Shatzky’s 45 poems in this collection are written in the second person. They address a “you” who might be the reader but who sometimes seems to be the poet talking about herself. This commingling joins reader and poet in a heightened shared experience. In other poems, we meet Shatzky in her first-person self, whom she knows to be two people, one calm, the other volcanic. This complex writer, in her seemingly simple language, shows us how to be aware of magic on a city street, how to struggle against conformity, how to maintain the desire to dance towards the deadline, and how to ring the bells as you go.

—Audrey Grescoe, editor of The Book of Love Letters: Canadian Kinship, Friendship,

Reading a collection of Lisa Shatzky’s poems is dazzling... Lisa can take media stories from ‘over there’—the trophy- killing of a lion, suicide bombings in farway places—and move us into a closer and deeper connection. Throughout, she invites us to share her perceptions, sometimes expressed in terms of listening (‘All you have to do | is listen to the sounds beyond the night’) and sometimes in seeing beneath the surface: ‘all things cover and hide and reveal | something deeper inside | if you wait long enough’. If you wait long enough: lisa gives us the patience to wait.

Susanna Braund, author of Seneca: Oedipu

Description

Lisa Shatzky’s poetry has been published widely across Canada and parts of the U.S. Lisa’s book Blame it on the Moon was published by Black Moss Press in 2013 and was short-listed for the 2014 Acorn Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. Her poetry book Do Not Call Me By My Name, also published by Black Moss Press, (2011) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Poetry Award in 2012.

When not writing, Lisa works as a psychologist on Bowen Island, BC, Canada, where she lives on a boat with her family of people and animals.