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Welcome to my Web site!
AWARDS/HONOURS FROM 2000 ONWARDS
Born to an Armenian father and an
Anglo-Indian mother, Keith Garebian holds a doctorate in Canadian and
Commonwealth Literature from Queen's University. The author of sixteen books
and a chapbook, he is a widely-published writer. His reviews and articles
have appeared in over a hundred
newspapers, journals, magazines, and anthologies. In 2000, he became the
first critic-at-large to be appointed by a public library, when he was
contracted to post theatre and book reviews for three years on the website
for the Mississauga Public Library. His poetry has been published in
Impulse, Echo, Inscape, The Antigonish Review, Literary Review of Canada,
Exile, Quarry, Grain, The Malahat Review, and various anthologies. The winner of the 2000
and 2008 Mississauga Arts Award for Writing, he won First Prize in the
Canadian Authors Association Poetry Contest in 2009, writing grants
from the Ontario Arts Counci,l and top prizes for free
verse and haiku from the Ontario Poetry Society and the Scarborough Arts
Council/Lakeshore Arts Council. Some of his work has been translated into
French and German. A member of the League of Canadian Poets and
The Writers’ Union of Canada, he is available for public readings and
symposia. CHILDREN OF ARARAT
What the critics have said:
“Some critics have called Garebian's memoir post-modern because of the broken and fractured nature of the narrative. Postmodern texts call attention to their artifice and construction as an overt refusal of authoritative realism. Truth is problematized and reduced to points of view. Not so in this memoir. Inherent in the painful journeys Garebian has undertaken is the belief that words can explore and reveal truth.” (Lorne Shirinian, Books In Canada)
“...powerful images...Garebian's words evoke the vivid colours and intense emotions of Kahlo's surreal paintings, which evoke the flora and fauna, folklore and traditions of Mexico. Poetic allusions to actual self-portraits interspersed with brief prose passages express Kahlo's physical pain, her love and admiration for Diego Rivera, and the suffering caused by his affairs.” (Roseanna Dufault, Canadian Literature, Vol. 191, Winter 2006 ) *Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems (2008) “.a beautiful and evocative tribute...Garebian's
poetic take on Jarman's life riffs on a variety of influences and
inspirations...Graced by degrees of subtle allusions to other works,
Garebian's poetry is, at times, reminiscent of Adrienne Rich's love poetry
and Ginsberg's call to America during intense political moments....Garebian's
romantic alliterative play...moves this collection beyond beautiful gestures
and into a powerful and highly original space...Garebian's work both defies
and defines an important poetic canon as he moves through the life of
another artist, within another medium, striving for beauty and excellence
within a marginalized form, yet simultaneously reaching out toward a world
of experience.” “He can vivify relatively
straightforward realism or abandon it altogether: presenting
sensuous tableaux that swirl magically into gymnastic action.
He can shift abruptly yet convincingly between the ornate and the coarse,
the ethereal and the nightmarish, the wittily cerebral and the violently
brutal. A sensibility both filmic and painterly is fully operative, and in
passage after passage a sinuous energy joins an uncanny clarity of
expression. There's a rare urbane panache and aplomb in scene-setting, in
characterization, in narrative drive and in thought....Blue is an
outstanding, sustained achievement and takes us places, full-frontally,
which most poetry lacks the imaginative and stylistic resources to do more
than flirt with.”
“Graced by degrees of subtle citation...powerful and highly
original...”
“Garebian's virtuoso trick is to only once or twice in the
entire collection slip into a description of Jarman's desires not expressed
through action....Garebian's skill comes in the activation of the eyes: with
this choice he creates the illusion of observed fact rather than speculation
and authorial commentary. The 'tension' then between Garebian's subect and
the way it is shown has everything to do with the illusion of autonomy he
creates for Jarman, the character, from author and reader alike.” “ Keith Garebian’s Blue is a haunting elegy to an artist whose films left an indelible mark on queer consciousness, as much because of Jarman’s brashness at a time when we were all battening down the hatches and doing damage control in our own lives, both public and private, because of the onslaught of aids, as well as because of Jarman’s uniquely personal vision as a filmmaker.The poems reverberate with an intimate and cumulative knowledge of the artist’s work seen in hindsight. At times, they achieve a visionary quality that stems from a critical perception of Jarman’s oeuvre, coupled with Garebian’s personal imagining of the man behind the work. In this way, the poems serve as both biography and critical exegesis of the films. Edward II: A Queer History, for instance, is as much a snapshot of Jarman’s film as of his imagining of the misbegotten monarch who bears its title, while the multi-part Caravaggio serves as a series of vignettes illuminating both the historical artist and his modern-day artist-biographer. While not lengthy, Blue is a full work. The book is cleverly divided into a biographical Prologue, a critical Corpus, and a final section, Blue, that serves as a meditation on the dying Jarman and his final work, Blue, a non-imagistic “film” that provided a backdrop for Jarman’s ponderings on life, death and art. These works contain both vibrant imagery and richly imagined drama, and are a pleasure to read. They should be—they were written by a masterly word-artist and inventor who might, had the two met, have mesmerized Jarman with his own creativity.” (Jeffrey Round, www.jeffreyround.com) *Children of Ararat (2010)
“It’s
a passionate and angry collection of poems focusing on the massacre of
ethnic Armenians in Turkey in June, 1915. ...The book, though, is more than
a catalogue of atrocities....the book opens with a selection of poems that
reflect on his father’s
story,
‘the whole mad history of it.’
Other poems explore the effects of the genocide on the survivors and on the
descendants of victims. Garebian also comments on how the genocide has
affected artists of Armenian descent and their works: the paintings of
Arshile Gorky, the plays of William Saroyan, and the films of Atom Egoyan...The
writing is evocative and full of powerful images. Sometimes, as Garebian
describes, the whole landscape answered in pain:
“Between
the staked olive trees, the partridge/caught their spurs in wires/wrenching
the skies with cries.’”
“This
is a momentous collection rendered by a poet in his prime. Children of
Ararat takes the reader on a harrowing journey beginning with the
Armenian Genocide of 1915 and continuing on to the denial that lingers to
this day. While the horror is made clear, there is something oddly joyful in
the mourning, in the poet’s
ability to give voice to the long-dead. Without hyperbole, the poet evokes
the gruesome events and articulates how, as the inheritor of his father's
experiences, he finds himself
‘trapped in an abyss’
created nearly a century ago. As with his previous collection, Blue: The
Derek Jarman Poems, Garebian once again creates a living elegy that at
times reaches almost beyond words.”
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This site was last updated 07/21/10