You Were Here - Andre Narbonne
Andre Narbonne’s first poetry collection, You Were Here (Flat Singles Press), paints in vivid language the felt-reality of childhood. According to Tom Wayman, “André Narbonne deploys an austere precision of imagery that depicts in the sharpest possible focus his poems’ scenes, incidents and characters: ‘a blue balloon . . . / . . . tumbles tentatively on the beach in search of a lost child’ or a house lawn reveals ‘the commonplace litter of a distracted family.’ In both lineated and prose poems, Narbonne provides an unflinching look a rural Ontario childhood.”
Second prize winner of the Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Canadian Book Design, 2016.
Andre Narbonne’s first poetry collection, You Were Here (Flat Singles Press), paints in vivid language the felt-reality of childhood. According to Tom Wayman, “André Narbonne deploys an austere precision of imagery that depicts in the sharpest possible focus his poems’ scenes, incidents and characters: ‘a blue balloon . . . / . . . tumbles tentatively on the beach in search of a lost child’ or a house lawn reveals ‘the commonplace litter of a distracted family.’ In both lineated and prose poems, Narbonne provides an unflinching look a rural Ontario childhood.”
Second prize winner of the Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Canadian Book Design, 2016.
Andre Narbonne’s first poetry collection, You Were Here (Flat Singles Press), paints in vivid language the felt-reality of childhood. According to Tom Wayman, “André Narbonne deploys an austere precision of imagery that depicts in the sharpest possible focus his poems’ scenes, incidents and characters: ‘a blue balloon . . . / . . . tumbles tentatively on the beach in search of a lost child’ or a house lawn reveals ‘the commonplace litter of a distracted family.’ In both lineated and prose poems, Narbonne provides an unflinching look a rural Ontario childhood.”
Second prize winner of the Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Canadian Book Design, 2016.
“André Narbonne deploys an austere precision of imagery that depicts in the sharpest possible focus his poems’ scenes, incidents and characters....A sense of home grounds and sustains the poet; in contrast, he is aware that “no stranger / can draw anything but a self-portrait.” And thanks to Narbonne’s amazing eye and command of his art we are shown the familiar in unexpected places in our world, like those birds the poet notices that roost in the letters of large advertising signs, that ‘nest in the alphabet of commerce.’”
Review by Luke J, Frenette
ARC Magazine
The road motif is subtle and not repetitive; Narbonne commands it. He runs it through You Were Here without having it wander all over the pages. In “Red Brick,” the road is “so, so quiet,” is not something pronounced, and so can disappear, reappear, and take many forms. At times, the road’s a street beside which a broken barn “held secrets,” and, at other times, it appears as a shoreline along which Narbonne and his siblings scour sand to help their mother find her car keys. In the poem, “The Time the Lighting Went Down Mountain Street,” the road is “the ghost path crossing the cemetery.” This gothic scene foreshadows the somewhat ominous and macabre images in the rest of the book. At one point along Narbonne’s road, for example, he ran under “dark and dangerous clouds” to the carport to wait for his sister, who had the house key; at another point, his sister motions to “the street where / a dead man lay” whose “foot was twisted the wrong way / As though he was born to walk backwards.” Although the road is an abstract thing, Narbonne is still able to locate some of the concrete memories that live along it. Read the full review.
André Narbonne is a Canadian writer, whose novel Lucien & Olivia (Black Moss Press) was longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize. Originally a marine engineer, Narbonne settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the mid-1980s, and studied English literature at Dalhousie University. He is a former chair of the Halifax chapter of the Canadian Poetry Association, and was the winner of the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick's David Adams Richards Award in 2008 for his short story collection "The Separatists". He later pursued his Ph.D. at the University of Western Ontario, and is currently a professor of English at the University of Windsor. His short story collection Twelve Miles to Midnight (Black Moss Press), was published in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2017. In 2017, he published the poetry collection You Were Here (Flat Singles Press). Lucien & Olivia, his debut novel, was published by Black Moss Press in 2022.
Poetry
72 Pages
November 2017
