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McCaslin, Susan
No full textretiredPhD (University of British Columbia)
MA (Simon Fraser University)
I am the author of fifteen volumes of poetry and nine chapbooks. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in 1984 and taught at Douglas College in B.C. in the English and Creative Writing Departments from 1984-2007
Arousing the spirit: Provocative writings
No full textThese writings by author-poet Susan McCaslin offer fresh and alternative ways of seeing and understanding our relationship with the Spirit. Christian-based, the 14 pieces that make up this collection (on topics such as perfectionism, paradise, the Beatitudes, Revelation, and presence) range beyond the compass of traditional Christianity to reveal universal wisdom and meaning. Written in beautifully nuanced language that articulates her clear thinking and captures her poet heart, the book reflects the central passions of McCaslin’s life: “mysticism (or the direct experience of the sacred) and its place in everyday life; peacemaking and justice;…the relation of spirituality and sexuality; and the significance of Jesus of Nazareth once divested of outworn theology and his sappy Hollywood persona.” McCaslin believes that actions speak louder than words or beliefs, and her pieces encourage us to explore ways to live life as a “mystical dance.” Each chapter is prefaced by one of McCaslin’s exquisite poems, leading the reader into a place of quiet contemplation from which to explore the writing. --From publisher description
Common longing: The Teresa poems and a canticle for Mary and Martha
No full textThese poems string from a tradition of mystical contemplation, asking such questions as: How can one sustain an interior life in the midst of a material culture? How can a person bring the fruits of that interior awakening back into the world? The book moves freely between the unified polarities of contemplation and action, utilizing both free verse and metrical experimentation. --From publisher description.poetr
At the mercy seat
No full text"At the Mercy Seat" explores the relentlessness of mercy as it permeates the natural world and also our relationships, opening them to mystery. Whether the poems reclaim biblical stories or the voices of McCaslin’s poetic progenitors, they are compelling and finely nuanced events leading to a contemplative being-in-the-world, in which spirit and matter, the sacred and profane, the delicate and the disturbing develop as a unified field.This is a book about thresholds: the meeting places of silence and language, suburbia and coastal wilderness, the seemingly disparate worlds of parent and child, husband and wife. The poems remind the reader that magical transformations can occur at places both “here” and “there,” that we are all to some extent “threshold dwellers,” that divine mercy still breaks into the middle of our most ordinary lives — with a sudden rupturing of the fabric, the “jagged edge of raw blue silk torn from its skein.” --From publisher description.poetr
Painter, poet, mountain: After Cézanne
No full text"Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne" re-enacts a journey to Aix-en-Provence in 2013, where the poet found herself in a “heart-soul-mind-clench” with the post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. Her book traces how the artist accompanied her home to the Fraser Valley outside Fort Langley, British Columbia, where she gazed through his eyes to see afresh the trees and landscapes near her home. Readers may be surprised to discover the impact of Cézanne’s achievement on later poets, philosophers, and writers, the enormity and enduring quality of his legacy. Read as a whole, this book suggests that Cézanne was an early deep ecologist. -- From publisher description.poetr
A plot of light
No full textSusan McCaslin’s "A Plot of Light" charts a contemplative journey in which the world of visionary dreaming lies along a continuum with the everyday life of the mystic, baffled and blessed by moments of connection with a larger, more comprehensive mind, wooing us with her poems into the world of the invisible. The poems form a quaternary, beginning with a series of visionary dreams, then exploring the dreamer as pilgrim treading the sites of poet-contemplative Thomas Merton’s birthplace in Southern France. The poems integrate moments of transcendence into the sharper light of the everyday, and the volume ends with an elegiac sequence about the decline and death of the poet’s father, in which the world of the dead is inseparable from the world of the living. These poems embody the longing for the birth of a new self. --From publisher description.poetr
Flying wounded
No full text"Flying Wounded", Susan McCaslin's seventh book of poetry, is a daring exploration of the disturbance wreaked on a daughter by her mother's ill-treated, then untreated, mental illness and of the daughter's almost miraculous transformation. The first half of the book charts the decline of the mother, "a boisterous southern woman of voluminous laughter" who finds herself "incarcerated in an inquisitional tower." The tower is both the asylum (a university hospital) and, later, her own phobic existence as a "mall bag lady." -- From publisher description.poetr
Lifting the stone
No full text"Lifting the Stone" is the finest collection yet by an award-winning poet with a growing reputation for writing with passionate candor and exquisite finesse on matters of faith and spirituality in the tradition of Herbert, Hopkins, and Avison. A series of courageously forthright treatments of the problematics of 21st Century belief is complemented by a set of affectionately witty accounts of family, students and mentors, electronic technology, and a veritable bestiary of creatures; and the book concludes with a luminous meditation on water "in her myriad transformations." --From publisher description.poetr
Demeter goes skydiving
No full textA part of the "cuRRents" Canadian literature series.What if Demeter, the timeless fertility goddess of ancient Greek myth, slipped through a crack into the twenty-first century, shook off her ankle bracelets, corn tassels, and garlands, and began a tour of our improbable culture? Award-winning poet Susan McCaslin exercises the profound mother-daughter trauma forged in the Demeter-Persephone myth with unapologetic modernity. This sequence takes on a novel life all its own: Hades steals away the maiden into a cult/culture of distorted body image, addiction, high anxiety, and rampant consumerism. Mother Demeter must negotiate this alien world of health clubs, paparazzi, and so-called reality shows locked in spiritual winter. McCaslin's lyrics are by turns profound, hilarious, and devastating as she journeys to the heart of a mother's love for her daughter. Here is poetry that seeks ties to the past inside the present, poetry that speaks to us all. --From publisher description.poetryCanadian literatur
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