A Suit of Nettles

Front Cover
The Porcupine's Quill, May 14, 2014 - Poetry - 80 pages

The title of A Suit of Nettles was inspired by a German fairy tale. Seven suits of nettles are woven by the sister of seven brothers who have been changed into swans. When the time comes for the seven swans to put on their suits of nettles and regain human form, the arm of one suit is not finished. Consequently one brother always has one swan’s wing instead of an arm.


The poem, like Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, is a sequence of pastoral eclogues, one for each month of the year, but here the dialogues are not between bucolic swans, they are between Ontario geese! Although the goose-eye view is bound to be somewhat restricting there is much carefully observed detail about farm houses, spring in a small pond, summer in a pasture and the small town Ontario Fall Fair. There are some ambitious satirical wallops at the English critical school headed by F. R. Leavis, at philosophy, progressive education and Canadian history. Here is a poet who believes in merry invective.


Lively, fanciful, humorous, this poem is also remarkable for its metrical ingenuity and skilful contrasts of harsh, brassy passages with mellifluous lyric. Parts of it were read on the CBC radio programme Anthology in the mid-1950s and the April Eclogue first appeared in The Tamarack Review.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
7
Section 2
8
Section 3
13
Section 4
17
Section 5
25
Section 6
31
Section 7
35
Section 8
38
Section 11
46
Section 12
47
Section 13
53
Section 14
55
Section 15
67
Section 16
71
Section 17
75
Section 18
78

Section 9
39
Section 10
43
Copyright

Other editions - View all

A Suit of Nettles
James Reaney
Limited preview - 2010

Common terms and phrases

anser argument arms basket beak beat beneath bird Black Moon Bloodroots blot bon~re Branwell brothers burdock busto can’t child chop chop chop cloud cold cried dancing dark dead death di}erent Door doorknob Dorcas dream earth eclogues effie eggs elds eyes Fair Fanny farmhouse feathers Ferris wheel frog funhouse gander geese gentian George’s girl glass horse Go bid God’s golden goose goosehouse grass gray green grime hand head heart horse’s huge Killdeer leap legs lives lobo look love’s marking ring merry-go-round mind Moon Mopsus night once Ontario pail Pouter Pigeon pretty raymond ring robber round salt Scrutumnus Shepherd’s Calendar shepherds sideshows sing snapping turtles snow song spring Squirrel corn straw Strictus su}er Suit of Nettles sun+ower teeth There’s things Thomalin threshing Threshing machine trees turn valancy wawled wings winter wonder young goslings zing zing

About the author (2014)

James Reaney was born on a farm in South Easthope near Stratford, Ontario in 1926. He has won the Governor General’s Award three times for his poetry, though he is perhaps better-known as a playwright, especially for his landmark Donnelly trilogy (1974-75). Reaney’s theatrical adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass returned to the stage at Stratford in the summer of 1996.


His work includes: The Red Heart, poems, 1949; A suit of Nettles, poems, 1958; Twelve Letters to a Small Town, poems, 1962; The Killdeer & Other Plays, drama, 1962; Colours in the Dark, drama, 1969; Collected Poems, 1972; Listen to the Wind, drama, 1972; The Donnellys, a trilogy of plays, 1974-75; Baldoon (with C.H. Gervais), 1976; The Boy With an R in His Hand, young adult, 1980; Take the Big Picture, young adult, 1986; Alice Through the Looking-Glass, stage adaptation, 1994. James Reaney died in 2008.

Jim Westergard was born in Ogden, Utah in 1939. He was educated at a variety of colleges and universities in California, Arizona and Utah where he completed his BFA and MFA at Utah State. Westergard taught at Metropolitan State College and Northern Illinois University before moving to Alberta in 1975, where he taught at Red Deer College until his retirement in 1999. He became a Canadian citizen in 1980.


Jim Westergard has been creating prints from wood engravings since university days in the late 60s, but had never completed a book-length collection until the original limited letterpress edition of Mother Goose Eggs. The first engraving for this project was finished in 1999. Then, after a four-year struggle which included an unexpected hernia operation and reprinting the press-sheets a second time with helpful hints from Crispin Elsted of the Barbarian Press (Mission, BC), Mother Goose Eggs was finally bound and released in a deluxe edition of eighty copies in 2003.


Westergard continues to create wood engravings on his cantankerous old VanderCook SP-15 proof press which he has affectionately named the ’Spanish Fly’. His recent titles include Oddballs (Porcupine’s Quill, 2015) and See What I’m Saying? (Porcupine’s Quill, 2018).

Bibliographic information

TitleA Suit of Nettles
AuthorJames Reaney
Illustrated byJim Westergard
Editionrevised
PublisherThe Porcupine's Quill, 2014
ISBN1122977158, 9781122977159
Length80 pages
Subjects › 

Poetry / Canadian
Poetry / General
  
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