This new volume brings together selections from several of Bringhurst’s collections of poetry, including The Beauty of the Weapons and The Calling, along with complete works including the polyphonic Conversations with a Toad and The Blue Roofs of Japan, and a series of new poems, “The Living.” The collection’s geography wanders from Japan to the Middle East to El Salvador to British Columbia. Bringhurst’s attention to place cuts below the level of foreign tongues and telling landmarks to more elemental meetings of stone, sky, water, bark, breath and blood. This elemental imagery is matched in a poetics that joins together the economy and elucidating repetition present in improvisational and classical music but so often missing from contemporary poetry. Poems from “The Book of Silences” and The Old in Their Knowing underline the influence of Eastern and pre-Socratic philosophers on Bringhurst’s thinking, lending the reflexive, sometimes near-unutterable concepts in the writings of Parmenides, Pythagoras, Empedokles, Nagarjuna, Dogen and Uddalaka Aruni, a certain physicality. Here too are attempts to whittle back to the experience of a body in a knowable and unknowable world. Those familiar with Bringhurst’s prose will find many of the same concerns manifested here. The author’s ideas about mythology, ecology, philosophy, language, art and music are taken up in verse. In particular, polyphonic poems and the typographic illustration of them are represented, with selections from Ursa Major, as well as The Blue Roofs of Japan, New World Suite No. 3, and Conversations With A Toad, each in their entirety. About his continued fascination with polyphonics, Bringhurst says: “If conditions are right, it is good for poems to be spoken aloud. I mean that the poems themselves can benefit and if that occurs, people may benefit too. Some of the poems in this book are composed for two or three voices speaking together, saying the same thing differently or saying different things at once. I understand that this may seem a needless complication, but poems have presented themselves to me in this form now for many years, and I have not found any way around it. In this book, where different voices speak at the same time, they are printed in different colors. The poems in which this happens can be read in silence alone or read aloud with one or two friends if conditions are right. Which, in the presence of one or two friends, they just might be.”

Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Bringhurst, Robert

History & Criticism

JONATHAN CAPE.

This new edition of a collaboration between one of the finest living artists in North America and one of Canada's finest poets includes a new introduction by the distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Ten masterful, complex drawings by Bill Reid and ten tales demonstrate the richness and range of Haida mythology, from bawdy yet profound tales of the trickster Raven to poignant, imagistic narratives of love and its complications in a world where animals speak, dreams come real, and demigods, monsters, and men live side by side.

Raven Steals the Light

Politics & Social Sciences

REID, WILLIAM

Social Sciences

Univ of Washington Pr

This new edition of a collaboration between one of the finest living artists in North America and one of Canada’s finest poets includes a new introduction by the distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Ten masterful, complex drawings by Bill Reid and ten tales demonstrate the richness and range of Haida mythology, from bawdy yet profound tales of the trickster Raven to poignant, imagistic narratives of love and its complications in a world where animals speak, dreams come real, and demigods, monsters, and men live side by side.

The Raven Steals the Light

A sequence of nearly one hundred images documenting the construction of the canoe and the creatures, of Haida mythology, within it.

The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii

Contemporary

University of Washington Press

This new edition of a collaboration between one of the finest living artists in North America and one of Canada’s finest poets includes a new introduction by the distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Ten masterful, complex drawings by Bill Reid and ten tales demonstrate the richness and range of Haida mythology, from bawdy yet profound tales of the trickster Raven to poignant, imagistic narratives of love and its complications in a world where animals speak, dreams come real, and demigods, monsters, and men live side by side.

Reid, Bill

Children's Books

The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems

Poetry

MCCLELLAND STEWART

The Haida world is a misty archipelago a hundred stormy miles off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska. For more than a thousand years before the Europeans came, a great culture flourished on these islands. In 1900 and 1901 the linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last traditional Haida-speaking storytellers, poets, and historians. Robert Bringhurst worked for many years with these manuscripts, and here he brings them to life in the English language. A Story as Sharp as a Knife brings a lifetime of passion and a broad array of skills—humanistic, scientific, and poetic—to focus on a rich and powerful tradition that the world has long ignored.

A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World

University Of Nebraska Press

The Haida world is a misty archipelago a hundred stormy miles off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska. For more than a thousand years before the Europeans came, a great culture flourished on these islands. In 1900 and 1901 the linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last traditional Haida-speaking storytellers, poets, and historians. Robert Bringhurst worked for many years with these manuscripts, and here he brings them to life in the English language. A Story as Sharp as a Knife brings a lifetime of passion and a broad array of skills—humanistic, scientific, and poetic—to focus on a rich and powerful tradition that the world has long ignored.

The Elements of Typographic Style

The Elements of Typographic Style is essential for professionals who regularly work with typographic designs. Robert Bringhurst writes about designing with the correct typeface; striving for rhythm, proportion, and harmony; choosing and combining type; multilingual typography; designing pages; using section heads, subheads, footnotes, and tables; applying kerning and other type adjustments to improve legibility; and adding special characters, including punctuation and diacritical marks.

Arts & Photography

Graphic Design

Hartley & Marks

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bringhurst, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bringhurst, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bringhurst, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Selected Poems

Raven Steals the Light

The Raven Steals the Light

The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii

The Raven Steals the Light

The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems

A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World

A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World

The Elements of Typographic Style

The Elements of Typographic Style