Open Up the Sky

Title

Open Up the Sky

Date

2015

Author

Genre

OPEN UP THE SKY is a unique and beautiful correspondence between two poets. Each writer takes up the verses of the other as an inspiration and a provocation, as an invitation to recall and reimagine and recreate the Canadian landscapes that have become home to them. This exchange of language and memory produces a poetry of intimate insight that transcends any particular location and speaks to the broader experience of being human in the world.

EXCERPTS
Silence is sometimes broken
Sound to past selves
Still finding forward into this time
where love is still the reason.
I shed my brown skin for spring
while rushes whisper more than lullabies
and memories rush breeze
through pores: the soul’s osmosis
filters each `was’ and `might have been’
’til time dissolves and we are found
back in the place of hallowed ground,
the soft sere prairie song,
this ancient future rune.
– Heather Cardin

And silence is sometimes spoken
in brushes of wintered fingers.
Our past springs forward,
a whine in the wind singing:
“This is you and was you.”
Swept in the rush of green
we seek a closer we
not broken.
– Rob O'Flanagan

REVIEWS
“The reader will find both the ecstatic and the woeful, the strange and the familiar in this dialogue, like a theatrical play of idea and response. Two voices, melding, and then disappearing off into their own colorful universes. Two voices, sensuous, and seeking to play, to define the indefinable.” — Valerie Senyk

About the Author

Rob O'Flanagan

Rob O'Flanagan has been a newspaper reporter, photojournalist and columnist for nearly twenty years. He has won numerous Ontario Newspaper Awards and a National Newspaper Award. He is the author of The Stories We Tell and The Blown Kiss Collection, two volumes of short fiction that began as a CBC Radio series in northern Ontario. He writes, performs and records poetry, and is a visual artist. Raised on a farm in central Saskatchewan, he is a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan. He lives in Guelph and is currently writing a novel.

His collection of poetry, Open Up the Sky: A Poetic Conversation, co-authored with Heather Cardin, is available from Vocamus Press.

Heather Cardin

HEATHER CARDIN has been teaching English literature for over two decades, in several provinces and a couple of countries. She has a B.A. and B.Ed. from the University of Saskatchewan, and an M.A. in English from Carleton University. She has published four non-fiction books, a book of poetry called Hierophany: Poems of the Sacred, and poems in several anthologies. She has short-listed twice for the CBC Literary Awards in Poetry.

Poetry has woven through her life from the lyricism of having a musical mother, through the years of teenage angst, to study, and then to writing, including a thesis on the works of Canadian poet Di Brandt. She has studied at a variety of poetry workshops, including short tutelage from Patrick Lane and rob mclennan; she is grateful to Amanda Earl at Bywords, Ottawa for opportunities to publish and read, and to Ursula Vaira, at Leaf Press, for her dedication to the craft. She’s mostly grateful for the constant reading of poets, whose voices linger: weaned on Whitman and Neruda, she now enjoys Rumi, Mary Oliver, and Lorna Crozier, among others.

Her collection of poetry, Open Up the Sky: A Poetic Conversation, co-authored with Rob O’Flanagan, is available from Vocamus Press.

BOOKS
Open Up the Sky: A Poetic Conversation (Vocamus Press, 2015)
The Bright Glass of the Heart (George Ronald, 2013)
Hierophany: Poems of the Sacred (Heather Cardin, 2010)
Mind, Heart, and Spirit (Bahai Publishing, 2009)
A Warm Place in My Heart (George Ronald, 2007)
Partners in Spirit (Bahai Publishing, 2006)

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