Into the Early Hours

By Aislinn Hunter

Aislinn Hunter is an accomplished fiction writer (most recently, What's Left Us), but poetry is her first love. Her poems have been nominated for a prestigious National Magazine Award and are widely praised and published.Governor-General's Award-winning poet Lorna Crozier raves: "From the start, Aislinn never wrote small. Her poems never took the route of skinny imagist responses to the world. Instead, her affirmation that the past and the present are inextricable led her into long, almost prose-like lines and the kind of movements through time that characterize fiction. Her poems, in fact, sometimes feel like highly condensed novels."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1551924986
• ISBN13: 9781551924984
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Raincoast Books, Polestar
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.5" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Unique, engaging, and memorable

Into The Early Hours clearly documents Aislinn Hunter as a gifted master poet whose verse is unique, engaging, and memorable. Recollection: The slim-wristed dead are with you again,/in their ruffled blouses and long white skirts --/two young girls, feet slung out of the hammock/on Chatham street, sleeping and as still as fish/too long out of water, mouths open/under a bright canopy of sun. It's late summer/and every afternoon has been like this one//but for your hand on the banister of the back porch,/as incongruous as an airplane in an apple grove./That you can touch her shoulder and wake her,/along with her sister and the small brown terrier/curled up in the shade. That the oak tree's leaves/feather your neck as you stand beside them.//She wakes up slowly and enters the house/as it if still existed, and the two of them/climb kitchen chairs and pick through the pantry/for snacks. Spread jam on bread then dip their fingers/in the jar. How young they are now,/and how forgotten. Her memories at work in you,/smell of the countryside when you wake.