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| Issue 13: | May 2022 |
| Poem: | 119 words |
By Karen George
Emily Carr’s The Great Eagle, Skidegate, B.C., 1929
His spiritual conception he buried deep in the woods he was about to carve.
—Emily Carr, Growing Pains1
Everything pointed, sharp: towering totem cocooned in a glass sky shattered into a puzzle of prisms, the firs’ barbed crowns, the eagle’s beak, wing tips, staccato slap of flying, the shredding talons not visible. Cedar aged a rich bronze and steel-blue as if morphing into sky, petrifying. Large eyes deep-set, mouth a wide grimace. From his perch he scans all creation, face in shadow, an intense tilt to his head. Has he spotted prey, ready to lunge and stab, or does he stare in disgust at what the world’s become?
The Great Eagle, Skidegate, B.C by Emily Carr2
Publisher’s Notes:
1. Epigraph is from pages 211-12 of Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily
Carr (Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, BC; 2005). For a sampling from two
chapters, see Obelisk Art History.
2. The Great Eagle, Skidegate, B.C. (watercolor on paper, 1935) by Canadian
artist Emily Carr (1871-1945) resides at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in British
Columbia. Enlargeable view of this painting and additional details are available at La Galerie de Uqàm (virtualmuseum.ca).
Karen George
is the author of five chapbooks, and three collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), and Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021). Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, The Ekphrastic Review, I-70 Review, The Indianapolis Review, Juniper, Poet Lore, Naugatuck River Review, Salamander, and Valparaiso Poetry Review; as well as in Slippery Elm as winner of their 2022 poetry contest.
Her poetry reviews appear in Poetry Matters.
Author’s website: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ Emily Carr: Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1932–35), poem by Karen George in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 6, January 2021)
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