Launch dates:
Wednesday, September 10th at 7 p.m. at Poetry in the Harbour, Nanaimo B.C.
Thursday, October 2nd, at 7 p.m. Salt Spring Island Public Library
Friday, October 10th, 7:30 p.m. Planet Earth Poetry, Victoria BC
Summoning
Jacqueline Bell
Jacqueline Bell’s, Summoning, maintains that “you reach the age when everything turns / to elegy.” This chapbook is elegiac, yes, familial, inconsolable: “Grief . . . always too late, missing the train.” As in, failed. Starlight has claimed her mother. The poetry is touching, tender. In the face of such regret, we can’t look away. We are reminded that humanity is as “lonely as foghorns.” The poetry is so compelling, we cannot take exception. Who cannot know this; who cannot agree? The ocean, the sand, the driftwood, the mint-green anemones, all come and go: “The opposite of eggs are headstones.” So much clarity, so much strength, so much, in life, is available, and yet so much is absent; as Bell maintains, “We dwell in the wake of memory.” So much in this chapbook lands in a true and meaningful place.
— John Barton and Arleen Paré, judges’ citation, 2025 Raven Chapbooks Contest
In starlight and the blood moon, wind and wild strawberries, in the toss and brine of the sea, in driftwood angels and crows, grief floods these poems with beauty. Shadowed by the poet’s “list of losses,” this collection calls back the “honeyed days” of memory and sets them against the long and final goodbye whose music is a mingling of sorrow and wonder. Jacqueline Bell’s Summoning is a marvel of lyric grace.
— Carla Funk, author of Gloryland
Poems in Jacqueline Bell’s Summoning work like charms, numen, touchstones. These poems are elegies, yes, but they are also songs of praise for life and its goings on—small fragments of beauty between the “plucked wild strawberry,” and the “latest test results.” Here between silence, marked by spaces between words, the intangible is held in feather, red-tailed hawk, eroding hoodoos.
— Yvonne Blomer, author of Death of Persephone: A Murder
Jacqueline Bell’s poetry has appeared in literary journals including The Fiddlehead, Grain, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Event, and in fourteen anthologies. Her chapbook Ubi Sunt was published in 2024 by The Alfred Gustav Press. Pax, won third prize in the Ontario Poetry Society’s Entitled Titles 2025 contest.
Available at independent bookstores in your community, and by direct order through Raven Chapbooks: click here
ISBN: 978-1-7781603-8-7 | POETRY | $22.95 + shipping
