Aislinn Hunter, poet and fiction writer, lives in Vancouver. She holds a BFA in Art History and Writing and an MFA in Creative Writing, and was writer-in-residence at Lancaster University (England) in autumn 2004.

Her first novel Stay (2002), set in Ireland and Canada, was shortlisted for the amazon.ca Best First Novel Award. What’s Left Us, her critically acclaimed story collection was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and won Silver in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. Her poetry collection Into The Early Hours (2001) won the Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Book of Poetry and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and was followed by a second collection, The Possible Past, in 2004 .

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Books I love

An old favourite
'The poet Gwendolyn McEwan’s TE Lawrence Poems -- one of my favourite books of Canadian poetry, taut and evocative. The book that made me certain I wanted to be a poet.
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.'

A new favourite
'JM Coetzee’s Disgrace.
Dermot Healy’s A Goat’s Song – the best evocation of place (and all that ‘place’ implies) that I have ever read.
Carolyn Forche’s Blue Hour (poems) – Forche bears witness here and reports back on the mess of the world, on its consolations. I often think this book should be required reading for all humanity.'

A current interest
'I’m reading Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire’s book on Rwanda – Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, and like the recent book by Lloyd Axeworthy (Navigating A New World: Canada’s Global Future). Dallaire’s book is making me think about my nation’s role in International Peacekeeping, about what it means to be Canadian, or, more simply, a citizen of the world.

I’m also rereading a great book of poems – Trouble In Mind by Lucie Brock-Broido (American). I’m interested in intertextuality in poems these days (my new book is full of allusions to literature, historiography) and so her use of say, Wallace Stevens’ notebooks or Rilke’s Elegies is very interesting to me.'

Aislinn Hunter, February 2004

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Featured poem

Marginalia Found in Books at the Vancouver Public Library

In T.S. Eliot’s Collected, a hand written dedication,
To all self-worshippers.

Over the line in Lord Nelson’s letter to Lady Hamilton
where he confesses,
“I can neither Eat or Sleep for thinking of You my dearest love,
I never touch even pudding...”
AM loves JB, looped letters in fat pencil.

In a cookbook, recipes corrected,
an even hand that writes in blue pen
They’re wrong about the eggs.

In Heraclitus, Japanese kanji drawn lightly beside a fragment
on the boundaries of the soul –
a bird house with an open roof for journey,
a woman’s long skirt-train for road.

In Walter Benjamin’s essays, a question mark
after the word “civilization.”

By the account of “An Albatross Shot on 1 October 1719,”
the comment It could not have happened this way.

Only once, when I was young,
did I write in a book I did not own –

In the Collected Works of Emily Dickinson,
with a black ink pen from my father’s study

I noted:

it’s death, dear Emily,
with a small “d.”

Aislinn Hunter © 2004