Reviews

Posted by Daniela Elza on May 28 2010

Here I will try to collect editorials/comments/reviews which I have come across regarding my work.

2011

THE BOOK OF IT (print)
116 pages, $11.99
THE BOOK OF IT (PDF file download)
116 pages, $2.99
ISBN 978-0-9869441-1-6
THE BOOK OF IT (eBook)
116 pages, $2.99
Published April, 2011
ISBN 978-0-9869441-0-9

What you have said about the book of it:

  • “WOWEEEE. It is like the Tao Te Ching but more colourful. I love that part about sitting by the campfire with Plato, melting the Forms into marshmallows. The playfulness of the book dabs from a palette of delight onto the grey matter of the adult mind. I love how you get really in between things, like a child fitting between a wall and the refrigerator. So original! So refreshing! I am also really impressed by how you create a mood and an aura with so few words. Quite masterful…”

    • —Alex Winstanley, poet

  • “‘It’ is that window, that urgent bright day which reminds us of the possibilties that call us, if only we’re willing to step out from our four walls. Each page of ‘It’ is a dynamic meditation, a burning juxtaposition, a study in inner tension. ‘It’ is brave– Elza gently takes the reader’s hand, and, with her trademark sense of humour asks the critical questions in a compassionate, high-spirited way. The result is the reigniting of that fundamental spark of wonder that exists within all of us. Elza is both teacher and student in this beautiful epistemological exploration.”

    • —Christina Shah, freelance writer and editor

  • “the book of it speaks up for what gets left out by the obsessive concern with quantifiably measurable outcomes in education. It celebrates the spirit of adventure, play, and imagination, and the receptive openness, curiosity, and wonder at the heart of the passion for learning. It evokes the deep sources of inspiration that make possible the mind’s most transformative experiences. I’m sure I will re-read it often.”

    • —William A. Welton, Visiting Affiliate Assistant Professor, Loyola University, Maryland, co-author (with Gary Alan Scott) of Erotic Wisdom: Philosophy and Intermediacy in Plato’s Symposium, SUNY Press, 2008.

  • “When it comes to the gap between education and learning, Daniela ‘gets it’. She happily explores it with her playfulness and unique poetic forms, writing in and out of the spaces between the brick and block buildings and the playgrounds filled with the ‘petals’ thought,’ the ‘hollows of trees,’ and where you might find ‘a blue guitar with one string.’ The Book of IT hop-scotches its way between poetry and philosophy, and invites the reader to join in it’s fun.”

    • —Al Rempel, poet (understories, Caitlin Press, 2010) and alternate teacher

  • “The Book of It is a tribute to ‘none of the above’ when it comes to the search for meaning and answers—both in life and in education. In this meditative book, Daniela Elza tries to find the It between ‘cash and two pieces of ID’ and ‘a blue guitar with one string (forgotten)’, between a tree trunk that ‘needs more than one person to embrace it’ and a measurement of ‘1000 words (can be more but not less).’ Without doubt, The Book of It is a pleasant surprise even to itself.”

    • —Arlene Ang, editor of The Pedestal Magazine, and author of seeing birds in church is a kind of adieu (Cinammon Press, 2010)

  • “This [poetic phenomenology of it] brings us closer to the experience we know: validating and true. [It pulls us.] Daniela, invites us into the image-as-experience and in her sharp, graceful, playful naming of attributes, does not make ‘it’ or us object. … Instead, we are free to be pulled into the truths that reverberate in it. If ‘it’, sometimes, comes open and leaves closed, in the experience of reading it, I come into it and leave open. I love it!”

    • —Christi Kramer, poet, teacher, activist

  • “‘It’ is the friend of the inarticulate that waters and nourishes the vast world within us: oceans of feelings, mountains of thoughts, valleys of good will, rivers of memory, orchards of creativity… Daniela has befriended ‘it’, and now introduces us to ‘it’- to your ‘it’ that you may have forgotten long ago. Do you recognize ‘the flame that blossoms on white winter walls and like laughter fills us’? Do you remember the time ‘when you enter its house you cannot leave each door opens onto another room within’? Thank you, Daniela, for taking me gently by the hand and leading me to ‘it’”.

    • —Heesoon Bai, Associate Professor, Philosophy of Education, Simon Fraser University

2010

more on 4 poets at goodreads by Arlene Ang.

This is a breathtaking anthology featuring the innovative poetry of four BC poets—accompanied by images of scribbled drafts and Joe Rosenblatt’s fantastic drawings. I particularly like how many of the poems also address the question of identity stemming from different roots.

Favorite poems for 2010 (Staff Pick):

Comments on the poem old dust made new which appeared in One Ghana One Voice in 2010:

“Daniela uses spaces to create a sparse landscape and a staccato of varied emotions in a poem that captures Harmattan in all its glory and grimness. ” – Prince Mensah

“I personally haven’t experienced Harmattan for a while and this piece brings back memories, particularly of when I was a kid and had little control about the damage that this season caused our hands and lips. Great work. ” – Julian Adomako-Gyimah

Excerpt from the Editorial in The SFU Educational Review regarding my piece of non.verifiable truths and other existent.ial celebrations

Daniela Elza lives and works in a multiverse of worlds, straddling the modern and postmodern, inviting us, through her play with the words and formatting of her concrete poetry, to reconsider meaning and our relationships to it. Drawing from the works of Robert Bringhurst and Gaston Bachelard, her work explores the complex relationships between language and knowledge. Elza’s poems may be said to exist in the well-established Canadian tradition of concrete and visual poetry: the works of Earle Birney, Bill Bissett, bpNichol, Judith Copithorne, and Steve McCaffery, to name but a few. But this is not the only tradition she in.habits. She is also a bud.ding philo.sopher (phila. sophia. her), and her work properly belongs alongside such Canadian luminaries such as Jan Zwicky and Tim Lilburn. Words may not be what they initially seem. We can recast them into wholly different forms and meanings with the simple placement of a period. Our benefit is that we get to think about things in a different way; sometimes we are shocked into a radical epistemic twist. What else can you do with a lines like
“I never thought as far as

the s unset”
?
Or how about this:

“.reality is that ill perceived light
that has to look into my eyes for
meaning.”

Elza’s pauses and dashes, her interruptions and periods, jar us out of a calm and certain scholastic comfort. At the same, though, they and the words she plays with are exhilarating and liberating for those used to a beginner’s mind, a beginner’s eye. Her poems at time strike with a resounding “Thwack!”, like a Zen koan. Her work, like Zwicky’s and Lilburn’s, is both lyrical and narrative, and like theirs, her words invite you along and hold you back to pause. They tease and torment.

2009

“Reclaiming language, and the sacred white space between words, spoken and written. That seems to be the unifying thread that enlivens this remarkable collection of poetry by newcomers Daniela Elza, Peter Morin, Al Rempel, and Onjana Yawnghwe. These poets recognize the integral relationship between land and language, language and perception, perception and memory. Their work is a much-needed breath of fresh air in Canadian poetry.
When I first read Daniela Elza I wrote that her poetry “sprawls out like a laconic god over a cosmic couch.” Her poems free-form across the page in what at first strikes one oddly, like a cross between a concrete poem and one that actually has something to say. Being born in Bulgaria, growing up in Nigeria and educated in the US and Canada, it’s natural Elza would want to remake language in her own images. “Words are such fascinating creatures—how they can mislead us and inspire us,” writes Elza in an email discussion of poetics. “And it is here that I want the reader to be smart to the point where they are in control of the playing with the words rather than the words playing with them.” Elza needn’t worry. She has a stunning skill for crisp renderings of fleeting moments powerfully imbued with spiritual resonance: “the way trees lean in / over / the flowing / as if trying to make it / into the frame / of your memory. / they want to stay. / keep calling to you.” (in the flicker of (time)”

You can read the whole review here.

2008

“How greatly must human language be stretched, how creative must we become in both our perceiving and our speaking, if we are to witness responsibly the human world? Daniela Elza’s poem In the Eye of a Crow comes directly after [Cheryl] Lousely’s essay as an exemplar of another sort of writing and subjectivity that might be more in line than that of [Farley] Mowat with sustaining our responsibilities to the living world. Among the innovative features of her poem, Elza asks that its open verse structure be read in all possible directions on the page. In requesting this of her readers, she is moving them to a more radical responsibility in regard to the words she has offered on behalf of a crow. She is also breaking open any controlling narrative structure by which the hold upon another living entity’s world might be solidified.”

— Dr. James Hatley (Professor of Philosophy, and guest editor, 2008)

2007

  • From the Editor’s Notes of Contemporary Verse 2, Vol 29, issue 3 (on the poems an introduction to semantic collapse, emergent river of meaning, and a meta eulogy

“In Daniela Elza’s poems, we watch words pull apart—literally to give us the visceral innuendo of spoken language collapsing, surging, the inherent space within metaphor, no matter how small.”

—Clarise Foster (Managing Editor of CV2, 2007)

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