Urban Fits
from the book jacket...
This new collection from Karl Petersen explores the urban landscape of Vancouver, BC. The poems both celebrate city life and express a yearning for belonging amid urban complexity. Petersen finds redemption from without and from within the city's walls where we hear cries for a significance of person and place. Often, the most unexpected revelations are found in the city's hidden corners.
The title, Urban Fits, suggests the neurotic state of urban life and questions whether the urban environment is fit for human life, but the title also implies that we who live there must fit ourselves the city as home. With humour and word play, through deft, vivid phrasing and startling metaphor, the voices in these poems offer spiritual insight into urban life.
I Will Sup With Him
August spreads cream and yellow cloud scraps
across a summer-stretched dusk--
potato peels left on God’s table after
the day’s turning, unearthing, and paring.
This recalls late afternoons when I was ten,
drops of sun trickling down our brown necks
as you pushed with canvas shoes on the spade
and I knelt above the splitting ground
waiting for the cold, rough nuggets
to erupt like gold from dark caverns.
In the kitchen you slipped a knife
into the slick spud-white flesh,
with deft strokes, the snap,
you split our toil into boiling pots
while my boy’s hands swam
in a Formica top of potato skins
fumbling with all God’s glory,
lost in sums and fractions of sky.
(from Urban Fits)
This new collection from Karl Petersen explores the urban landscape of Vancouver, BC. The poems both celebrate city life and express a yearning for belonging amid urban complexity. Petersen finds redemption from without and from within the city's walls where we hear cries for a significance of person and place. Often, the most unexpected revelations are found in the city's hidden corners.
The title, Urban Fits, suggests the neurotic state of urban life and questions whether the urban environment is fit for human life, but the title also implies that we who live there must fit ourselves the city as home. With humour and word play, through deft, vivid phrasing and startling metaphor, the voices in these poems offer spiritual insight into urban life.
I Will Sup With Him
August spreads cream and yellow cloud scraps
across a summer-stretched dusk--
potato peels left on God’s table after
the day’s turning, unearthing, and paring.
This recalls late afternoons when I was ten,
drops of sun trickling down our brown necks
as you pushed with canvas shoes on the spade
and I knelt above the splitting ground
waiting for the cold, rough nuggets
to erupt like gold from dark caverns.
In the kitchen you slipped a knife
into the slick spud-white flesh,
with deft strokes, the snap,
you split our toil into boiling pots
while my boy’s hands swam
in a Formica top of potato skins
fumbling with all God’s glory,
lost in sums and fractions of sky.
(from Urban Fits)