Open Up the Sky

Title
Open Up the Sky
Date
2015
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

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