The Blue Clerk

Ars Poetica in 59 Versos

By: Dionne Brand

Narrated by: Dionne Brand

Length: 4 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

Dionne Brand, author of the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Ossuaries, returns with a startlingly original work about the act of writing itself.

On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages--the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained. In The Blue Clerk award-winning poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet's pages. In their dialogues--which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems--the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Keipja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba, and Jorge Luis Borges. Through these essay poems, Brand explores memory, language, culture, and time, offering beautiful and jarring juxtapositions ("The Wire is the latest version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"), and endlessly haunting language ("On a road like this you don't know where you are. Whether you have arrived or whether you are still on your way. Whether you are still at the beginning or at the end. You are in the middle all the time. What would be the sign?").

An essential observer and one of the most accomplished poets writing today, Dionne Brand's latest engages intimately with the act and difficulty of writing, the relationship between the author and the world, and the relationship between the author and art. Profound, moving, and wise in equal parts, The Blue Clerk is a work of staggering intellect and imagination, and a truly sublime piece of writing from one of Canada's most renowned, honoured, and bestselling poets.

©2019 Dionne Brand (P)2019 McClelland & Stewart

Critic reviews

“Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk is many things at once: a book-length ars poetica; an act of memory and reconfiguration; an extended meditation (one that moves at times directly, at others by a kind of philosophical osmosis) touching on the realms of history, politics, race and gender; an internal, consciously curated and interrogated dialogue that manages to create a space for all of these. Expansive, beautifully written, structurally compelling, and above all moving, The Blue Clerk is a book to be read (and re-read), not just for the pleasures of its language, but for the breadth of its vision, and the capaciousness of its thinking.” (Griffin Poetry Prize Jury Citation)

“[Dionne Brand] is gracious, endlessly curious and eager to push the intellectual boundaries of her audience.” (Globe and Mail)

"Brand melds the intellectual with the sensory in these searching think-pieces." (Toronto Star)

Why Didn't I Hear about This Sooner?

I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes and pressed play. The simplicity of the conceit--a clerk, the author who is creating the clerk, the way they talk to each other, in a present tense that is metaphysical, through a frame of reference that catches Coltrane, Borges, the war in Iraq--seemingly anything--makes for a listening experience that is extraordinary. I always knew where I was and what I was visualizing. I am going to tell my friends about this.