Her many years as a practising psychiatrist and her personal experience as the subject of intensive psychoanalysis have given the poet, Farideh de Bosset, the opportunity to look at, and experience, life with an acute intensity of joy and pain. Each poem in this debut collection records the events of a woman's everyday life, as well as the poet's experiences of talking to, and healing with, patients, and friends and family, as well as the impact of literature and art, the countries she's lived in and visited, and, of course, her dreams and her understanding of those dreams on her work, her creation of art, and her life. Aware of the everyday juggling between different structures of the psyche and the external world in each and every one of us contributes to the poet's awe and admiration for the enduring nature of the human spirit. --- from the publisher Reviews: "Farideh de Bosset is not only a ‘new Canadian’ poet, she is an enticing voice of insight and inspiration...she elevates all minds and spirits, as she redefines her relationship with the material world."
— Ken Mitchell "A compelling first book. The voice of a poet with lyrical impulse."
— Rosemary Sullivan De Bosset's astonishing first poetry book lodges in the reader's heart and soul, nestling ever deeper and truer with each immersion. The dailiness of our lives achieves a luminosity rarely seen in poetry today. In a world increasingly a tilt, De Bosset's close observations of crows, fathers, poetry, new moons, death, dreams, doubt, aging ... render our struggles through a bold gaze and direct lyricism and in so doing, redeem us. As a psychiatrist, the poet knows acutely, intensely, our hidden motives, dreams, delights and sorrows. Her sly turns of phrase and thought, often voiced in the second person you, engage us in our own sojourns. For example: "Tune into that rage,/ envy,/ the evil-eye,/ power of destruction// Listen to yourself/ ... it may already be doing its job." (Envy, 37). Another example: "the dreaded/ heart-squeezing uncertainty,/ ... opening the spirit like a fiddlehead/ unfurls into the sky.// But certainty,/ ... limits and shrinks/ the air into a bottle." (Doubt, 40). This poem deftly suggests the spiritual discipline of being in our negative capability open to multiple viewpoints and slyly implies the suffocating and possibly addiction-prone stance of certitude. Keats couldn't have said it better himself. a tilt is beautifully presented by Inanna, eloquently written, and graced with an arresting cover artwork, a translucent tilting nude in a monochromatic seascape, by Elizabeth Macdonald. --Katerina Fretwell About the Author: Farideh de Bosset ( ___- 21 November 2012) was born in Tehran, Iran, where poetry is part of everyday life and conversation. At the age of 18, she moved to Switzerland where she obtained her medical degree in psychiatry. She interned in Quebec and then moved to Toronto in 1972 for her residency. She received her fellowship in psychiatry in 1972, and was a staff psychiatrist and assistant professor in psychiatry at the University of Toronto until 1991, when she established her private practice. Her poetry was published in a number of literary journals across Canada. |
