Thirty-Seven Small Songs and Thirteen Silences

Allison Sivak is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library,
University of Alberta.

Thirty-Seven Small Songs and Thirteen Silences presents another
evocative collaboration between poet Jan Zwicky and Gaspereau Press,
which is known for its beautifully produced books. Zwicky uses simple
language to imbue a sense of the wonderful, to give a greater life to
what we experience through the senses. The poems slip between the
philosophical and poetic inquiry and the concerns of the present, as in
“Small Song: Blue”: “The sky today: a single / perfect sound, an
open / throat, the now / that’s everywhere and there is / of time— /
[…] I guess I better / wear a hat!” As a continuation of Zwicky’s
ongoing exploration of lyric, the poems encompass the strangeness of the
familiar, and the mundaneness of the philosophical. Sparse on the page,
they balance text and white space, sound and silence through their
layout and design. These “small songs” are focused on the present
tense, rooted in physical experience, and quietly sung for the pleasure
of singing.