What Ever We Are

We are proud to announce that this book is part of “The John B. Lee Signature Series”.

Blurbs:

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In her book, Whatever We Are, Eva Kolacz records moments connected to people and places that have left an impression on her life, exploring the past as well as the present. As a sensitive and observant poet, she creates poems that are deep philosophical explorations.

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This collection of poems, Whatever We Are, will resonate with the reader in a powerful way. Full of emotions directly inspired by life, they explore the hidden roads of imagination, allowing readers to become immersed in new territories that are not always comfortable, even though necessary and rewarding.

Eva Kolacz began her journey without the need to escape from the facts. She had the ability to face the truth in order to find solace in the most challenging circumstances. These poems will transport the reader  beyond everyday matters – the world’s troubles – to bring us into a place of transcendence, of luminous intensity.

In her poem “The Blueprint of a Lake” she writes, We are now lost in the reflection of clouds / between the rocks covered with algae over time / time faster than our thoughts.

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In the book, Whatever We Are, Eva Kolacz has emerged as a poet who understands the power of the written word. Her poems become a stage that allows her inner thoughts to surface. Her poetry not only leads the reader into her world, but into the perspectives of others. Her poems are full of emotion. They are genuine and life-enhancing. By avoiding sentimentality, she depicts stories without shame. Her lines, although raw at times, strive to defy any challenge and overcome her haunting past through the destruction of unwanted images.

Her love poems dedicated to her husband, Laurence, evoke the joy of existence, and by their clever use of phrasing illustrate a playful vision of lovers’ intimate places. In her poem “Gypsy Love” she asks her husband:

oh hear the cries of the wind on bent grasses

when

I will go inside the fire       oh

clap your hands & dance      you the worshipper

of my desire.

As a poet and professional painter, she has an eye for illuminated detail, giving us remarkable poems and acting as a spiritual healer to achieve peace of mind. This is evident in her lines: “Walking among the Birds”: “like a whisper for the soul / the dreams still carry us lost travellers / over the crossing from night to day.”

Reviews:

Eva Kolacz’s Whatever We Are links the everyday and the visionary by a beautiful thread with twists of European lyrical intensity and North American directness and common idiom refined. For example, these lines from “Places Beyond Words”:”That’s a real possibility to taste the sun. / Things move and speak, / their existence is of a rising song…” I think of the relaxed manner of her countrywoman Wislawa Szymborsksa and the exalted directness of her countryman Czeslaw Milosz. I think too of Mary Oliver. But Kolacz forms herbeautiful phrasing and rhythm, her delight in the immediacies of nature, interpersonal love and shared experiences, and her prophetic hope for a better, truer way of seeing existence, into a blend that is fully her own. Whatever We Are is a book to be enjoyed, then treasured.

A.F. Moritz is the author of 19 books of poetry.
He has won Griffin Poetry Prize, been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship
and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award.
At present he is a professor at the University of Toronto and the Toronto Poet Laureate.

Eva Kolacz’s collection, Whatever We Are, is in the grand tradition of serious poetry where imagination, inspired and informed by observation, experience, and much reading, becomes illumination, becomes wisdom. An immigrant herself, Kolacz perceives that we are all “immigrants” on this planet, all “grains of sand”, innumerable, beautiful, each uniquely valuable.

Travis Lane is an award winning poet

and literary critic who published 15 books of poetry.

She is the recipient of many awards, including the Atlantic Poetry Prize

and the Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for High Achievement in English Literary Arts.

Reminiscing on childhood, Eva Kolacz appears to shake her head: “How little remains now / of that once so articulate wonder.” But these poems articulate wonder at every turn, a wonder perhaps intensified by an adult’s consciousness of time, which appears as nemesis in these pages. These are odes tinged with the poignancy of elegy, pledging themselves to what cannot last, “with furious awareness that [the] end will come in the sharp light / of early spring.”

Sue Sinclair has published several books of poetry
and has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award
and is a professor in the English Department at the University of New Brunswick.