Moving to climate change hours Ross Belot
13 Years in the making, Wolsak and Wynn is publishing the new poetry collection from 2016 CBC Poetry Finalist Ross Belot, a dark ode to the end of oil. From industrial accidents to frozen highways Belot charts the ends of a life that face a working man in stripped-down lyric poetry. These are poems that have seen it all and acknowledge the darkness that’s coming while still seeing beauty in the arched neck of a tundra swan. With a filmmaker’s sense of atmosphere and an environmentalist’s urgency, Belot’s stark lines take the reader deep into the heart of the industrial man. Order this book
“Ross Belot’s astonishing poetry steps off a moving train into the unknown. He deftly locates strangeness in the ordinary— in a sagging couch that shifts from one place to another in a room…
…or in a magpie that walks “through her body.” We find “Yesterday/ was all chainsaw” in poems that buzz with power, defying expectation. Moving to Climate Change Hours is a remarkable book, revealing a poet at the height of his craft.”
“It is wonderful to read these confident, wide-ranging poems.Belot takes recognizable subjects— work, marriage, parenting, drinking with co-workers, childhood, new love— and makes them strange again. Shifting between Canadian and…
…American landscapes and locales, and using many different poetic forms, what emerges is a strong and questioning personality, confronting his own life in middle age, as his own complicity in larger catastrophes. It’s a beautiful, intimate, ambitious, moving book written by a poet of great skill and deep feeling.”
“This is a great speculative and lyrical collection that asks hard questions with no easy answers.”
Moving to Climate Change Hours named one of the best Canadian poetry books of 2020