Montreal sends another Poet
Poets Reading at 66 King East - Thursday January 21, 2010

Cobourg’s invasion by Montreal poets continues unabated. Fresh on the heels of Carmine Starnino’s appearance at the Cobourg Poetry Workshop’s 3rd Thursday Poetry Readings late last year, comes Robyn Sarah who will be appearing on January 21 at Meet At 66 King Street East, reinforcing Cobourg’s growing reputation as a prime venue for poets.

"One critic began his review of my most recent collection by remarking, ‘Robyn Sarah is a deeply unfashionable poet.’" says Sarah. "I think that’s probably true – but I’ve chosen to take it as a compliment." Born in New York city to Canadian parents, Sarah grew up in Montreal where she began publishing her work in the early 1970s. "I can’t remember a time when poetry was not part of my reading experience.", she says. "My mother read me rhyming verse before I could read myself."

Author of Little Eurekas; A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry, as well as 10 books of poetry, Sarah wrote her first poems when she was eight or nine and has never stopped. "Usually, I begin with a cluster of words or a phrase that I like the sound of. They can occur in a conversation, or in the course of writing something else. I rarely know what a poem is going to be about when I start playing with these phrases. Many of them get written in stages – I come across abandoned ‘starts’ in old notebooks and suddenly they seem alive to me again and I get back to them. My ear is the greatest influence on how I write," she says. "I can say that my poems are grounded in the everyday; weather, the seasons, passing moments experienced or observed. Life stages. The passage of time has always been my underlying subject."

Robyn Sarah, who will be reading poems from her most recent collection, Pause For Breath, will be joined by two familiar Cobourg poets, Mark Clement and Wayne Schlepp. The evening starts at 7.00 and admission is free.