watershedBooks is a new publishing venture.
For more information, visit the watershedBooks website.
This is my first collection of poetry: Ophelia After Centuries of Trying. And I'm very happy to be a part of watershedBooks. Our inaugural book launch took place at the Bamboo Club on Toronto's Queen Street West on Tuesday evening, April 14, 1998 with a music program by Rod Anderson. For more information on watershedBooks visit the watershedBooks website.
After centuries of trying, Ophelia, an unformed figure "orbiting the site of [someone else's] catastrophe", finally steps out of the shadows to discover "the pain of a possible world." Through Ophelia and other personae (mother, artists, daughter, lover, war refugee) Merike Lugus explores questions of identity and survival. In tracing the hard process of reckoning with life's losses, these poems achieve a kind of radiance. Over and over they show how life is saved through acts of observation: noticing "how things hinge together / how wings fold"; and creation: the making of a garden, of friends, and of one's art. In this her first collection of poems, painter and sculptor Merike Lugus speaks with passion, lyricism, and poetic authority.
"A visual artist, Merike Lugus, with deft, sure words, paints images of startling beauty. By turns playful, seductive, melancholy, her palette runs the gamut of human emotion. Whether probing the fierce loyalties that bond even the most dysfunctional of families or the ramifications of the Ophelia stereotype or the coping mechanisms of those living with death and without love, her quest is no less than the reconciliation of the beauties of life with its cruelties. A work of full-fledged maturity."
Pat Jasper
"Merike Lugus . . . writes a lean verse in which the speaker examines her relationship with her father and lover using the Hamlet story as frame. . . . the poet-speaker in Ophelia after centuries of trying explores her own varying personae as daughter of a war refugees, lover, mother and artist. . . . Expertly, Lugus employs reported thought and speech to allow us to enter the rhythms of thought patterns in the characters' interactions with each other. . . . "From the Plath-like 'Daddy Why didn't You?' to the title poem 'Ophelia After Centuries of Trying,' which encapsulate the twin themes of dysfunctional relationships between the poet-speaker and her father and lover, Lugus creates a lyrical intensity using dense verses finely tuned by elliptical images."
excerpt from "Meditation's Pilgrimages, Feminist and Otherwise"
by Gillian Harding-Russell, in Event, Douglas College Review, Vol 28/1, Spring 1999