Help Sandy Produce Her 1st Poetry Book & Album
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Hi, I'm Sandy Bell and recently made some big life changes - moving to Canada's east coast, leaving my friends and job of 20 years (supporting creative music artists and managing Arraymusic). Now, I'm finally able to focus, wholeheartedly, on completing a book of poems I began writing as a young wife and mother starting out in my career. And I couldn't be more excited to embrace my new creative life.
I started writing poetry when I was studying Journalism at Ryerson in Toronto and never really stopped. My first published poem in Poetry Canada Review won Best New Voice Award. This collection of works, while grounded in wondering and a sense of wonder, charts many different life phases, from marrying to having an amazing son to separating to navigating life's challenges and learning along the way, to losing my only child, the light of my life, an unspeakable grief which writing about helped me survive.
I'm looking for some support in this period of low income to help me complete my lifetime of creative endeavour, my poetry book and album.
You can read some poems excerpted from my book in progress, below.
My first album features 10 of my original songs and will be called Break Of Day: Songs For Colin. The album was produced by award-winning musician and producer Andrew Collins (5 JUNO nominations/7 Canadian Folk Music Awards) and features many prominent talented Toronto musicians, including:
BREAK OF DAY ALBUM MUSICIANS:
Sandy Bell: lead vocals
Kristin Cavoukian: back-up vocals
Max Heineman: back-up vocals
Andrew Collins: mandolin/cello
Champagne James Robertson: electric guitar/acoustic guitar
Paul Matthew: upright bass
John Showman: fiddle/violin
Blair MacKay: drums
Burke Carroll: pedal steel
Richard Henderson: lap steel guitar
Recorded and mastered, I am now in the final stages of production, copyrighting, and determining distribution.
You can sample two songs from Break of Day on Soundcloud.
Please be sure to provide your name, email address, and mailing address along with your donation so I can thank you for your support with a hand-written thank you.
Many many thanks for your kind consideration and / or donation.
Sandy
EXCERPTS FROM MY HEART IS ABOUT TO BREAK INTO A MILLION PIECES
EXCERPT #1
Cubist skies scatter
short light wavelengths until
you are in my eyes, love
or
I am fleeing from myself
into us.
This hunger to unite
opens each mouth
to the pain of
an empty sky.
He arrives
and so we join
while the sky
forms breasts:
female breasts, rain breasts.
Air aereolas
the kind a pregnant woman gets
turn blacker
as the
blackened trees
sway in
choreographed disarray.
That day
he asked me to live with him
in his fear,
to utterly encompass
my love for the explicit world
in vows our bodies would repeat,
familiar as Summer to strawberries
that wear their need on their skin —
exterior wombs
turned inside out
like our love.
Finally
torrential rain
unleashes its gaul.
The fiddleheads
unfurl and drink.
All the mouths
submit
to the pain
of an emptying sky.
All is need
and air,
water
and him.
After the assault
the sun asphyxiates
our garden,
so hot.
Hen and Chicks
thicken
nonetheless.
Baby’s breath frets
a fine tremulous snow
across our postage stamp
of earth.
Vines are vampires —
they always steal the show
though we train them to grow
out and away
from the other customers of light.
Little girl on lawn
twirls, enraptured
in the downpour;
mouth wide
she tastes
acid rain
and the bearable light.
We merge
with the weeping sky.
EXCERPT #2
Seldom
do we recognize
there is a seeing
in our skin —
sacred pinpoints of light
the mouth locates
as if it is
a heat-seeking device
made to procure sex;
the way he moves in the dark
along me
as if
I am encoded in his lips.
Blind grandpa Arbuthnot
saw everything with his hands —
vegetables larger than anyone’s,
nearly prehistoric,
they sat in rows
pretty and straight
scored by the invisible rulers
of his third eye.
Blind grandpa Arbuthnot
saw that eyes
are an afterthought
before the fact of trees
which every child knows
are witnesses
to pre-history,
are pre-animal,
just as every poet knows
people are walking trees —
our legs are trunks
that learned to move.
This is why
we wander
far from our roots
seeking salt & water
in daily want
of a sodium-chloride fix,
why
retinal forests strain
through crimes of
simple complicities
and familial specificities —
that tamp and quash
with meanness and neglect —
to behold
once
their own thermoluminescence,
why
fire burning on water —
in love
as in death
we revert to pure light —
entrances us
or bends us
to our knees,
as Villiers bent
The Scientist before The Darkness.
I understand
he is engraved
in crevices of my lens —
branded there as if
I am an insignia
of him —
Mondrian’s Grey Tree.
To see him
is to recognize
instantly my self!
As an ear is
infant of the wind,
an elephantine adaptation
that transposes air
into a familial voice
so are eyes
instruments which detect
opportunities and threats.
They arrive in
movements aloft,
alien and full
of strange intents —
Who there? Friend?
Or foe?
Emissaries
of the sun
on a quest to burn
on and on
and on and on,
hunger’s imperative
to find fuel
to burn on
and on and on.
Therefore let us touch!
urgencies we cannot see
but our fingertips
apprehend.
I am invented in his fingertips!
EXCERPT #3
He brings me fish
and Azorean oranges
leftover from
Portuguese wedding banquets,
processions
and arch ceremonies
that make us human
like all rituals.
I don’t eat the head.
He eats the eyes!
Brains, guts,
the whole sordid mess,
spills into his mouth
offending my white gentility.
Four generations
of fine Pimentel men
sacrificed to photography,
to make themselves captured,
immune to change
and interred by their need
to obstruct their brides
in their blush.
I adore his clothes
because they hang in our closet.
This simple mundane fact
transforms everything
into something glorious.
Lately I’ve wondered:
has his mouth usurped
my ability to see
through the darkness
a body holds?
Has his darkroom
usurped him?
Each purchase on film
replaces some urge
he might have felt
to choose peace,
to surrender
to tranquility,
to make
a sweet life.
Instead
he makes us weak
craving me entirety,
maneuvering like his camera
to capture and control
how the light falls
into his lens,
to own me precisely.
There is an exorcism
in the way
a family reconstitutes itself.
I wish I could hold him —
as if my arms
were a lost womb
to make him new,
to fix him.
I wish
I could belong to belonging
the way
land annexed from Nature
belongs to its house,
and erase
his lifetime
of recriminations
and regrets.
As
his incessant
blame game
makes him
a love terrorist
slipping past
whatever guards
I had remaining
to enact
our mutual destruction.
As the snake knows Earth
I know his back!
The way the room ceases!
Venus throats then
supernovas!
Orchids on the Bruce Peninsula
escarpment
stretching delicate necks
become efflorescence!
His plates of spine
strain towards mine,
push into me
securing his illusion
love is secured
ever.
So much
everything
depends on
sky.
EXCERPT #4
I wish
I could whisper
some Mayan myth in your ear
that would erase all this pain, or
the grey oak’s indomitable hunger
could convince you
of the need
for continuing celebration
in the face of
our coral reef’s dim blood,
our dolphins’ hospital emergency,
the 300-mile-long hole
afloat in the Atlantic
somewhere
devouring everything
with nothing
10 miles deep.
Instead, you cross our X
collecting your papers,
contracts, negatives
all blowing around,
bound up with
the frail pink discards
of our cheery tree
completing itself.
You're hotwired
to the end of the frantic century!
Several burning bushes
are no longer golden
like our lives.
This poem blows
from shore to simplified shore
erasing itself.
How I have tried not to foresee this!
Today your friend went mad.
Emptied your life of its order
already emptied of faith
and I, your lover
in love with
the constancy of change,
cannot even save
us from our own worst impulses,
static feedback loops
that instruct you
to occupy and control.
How can I hope to communicate
now
even a smile
or some other repose
I would give you?
Air sticks
in our throats.
We wash it down with
apologies,
promises,
while a thousand urgent messages
bleed
through us,
into us.
I promise the sun will rise tomorrow!
The sound dereliction makes.
EXCERPT #5
On this, the occasion for joy,
your voice is annihilated
in Buffalo without us,
caught in live wires
intersecting February.
When our roof breaks open
and flies away
we wonder:
Was there ever anything but
this precisely desperate blue?
Were we ever acutely joined
at hips of understanding?
One last cirrus streak
dissipates,
turns gothic
auburn
then floats
to the west.
You stand under
the month’s schizophrenia
which freezes then melts,
unable to reject pain
or
revel in it -
you always preferred machinations
over approximations of
bliss.
I am walking out of
your Zeiss icon lens -
how you have polarized our love,
making you responsible for your socks!
I will lie
on this requiem-drenched lawn
once
drinking
the stinging torrent
of your anger
your absence
and then
I will open my mouth
and the raindrops
will kill me.
But I'll rise up
and catalogue the bullets
in a file of fire!
But first we will ponder:
Were our flaws so incompatible?
Or were we merely
the tragi-comedic result
of one man
and one woman
in a room?!
Small black clouds ascend.
Winter has never seemed so
generous.
EXCERPT #6
To remember
is to confess.
Cohen was always your favourite poet
because he sings for the enslaved
and bleeds
in nearly every poem.
I whispered this in his ear once
as Rebecca glowered on
from a corner somewhere,
catty
and territorial.
I remember
sitting in the middle
of a wigwam
constructed makeshift
from sticks and ferns
looking out,
orchestrating
the forest
through exaltation.
Walking home
on my foot path
I stopped
and professed
to all the trees:
We will always be here!
This will always be!
as if to convince
an alchemy of stasis
in the face of
changing clouds.
That day you walked out of
our silly fight
onto this page
and confessed:
I am afraid
if I forget
what I have been,
lived,
I will cease to exist,
fearful love
I knew you as
the grand gesture,
a firey dusk
and solar kiss
that burns
before it turns
black
and blacker
still.
Now
alone in my fear,
I remember
that I was loved.
October
against your lips,
in your lips,
the St. Lawrence River
in your blood,
the ships are in our blood,
you told me:
Nothing is lost.
Everything is retained.
I remember sitting
in a classroom
spinning pencil fossils
into a tornado
that was
my breath.
EXCERPT #7
Last night
we saw a black pearl
suspended in the umbra of
our cast body —
a gasp
with veins and
Bach variations
unextinguishable —
an arc of light
meeting
an arc of darkness
in
pure deep shadow
creating
an apex
of astonishment.
Our eyes
flew into this moon
defying that which
grounds us.
Organizer
Sandra Bell
Organizer
Shelburne, NS