The Literature Portal

The Literature Portal is a place to read, engage, contemplate and study poetry, literature and the world of contemporary art mediums.

 The Emily Isaacson Institute invites you to look with new eyes into the study of the self-disciplined artist and the influence of the arts on character development. Contemplate for a moment, the history of both musical and artistic time periods, and the change by individuals of influence needed to bring about a new era. Artists whose work was new and different were often rejected at first, to rise to fame later, being celebrated only after their death. Literature has been notorious for recognizing the effect of a writer and being forthcoming with publishing praise only after their death, and even prolific writers have been known to lead very reclusive lifestyles, negligent to publishing.

The Fleur-de-lis is such a testament to living in Canada among the diversity, heritage and culture. Emily Isaacson's writing is vivid, imaginative and a joy to experience. Her words literally unfold in a landscape of luxury for the senses, that expands a lifetime of terrain in a glorious pursuit of endless destinations. It is a must read for the sheer enlightenment.
 
Tracy Repchuk
President and Founder of the Canadian Federation of Poets

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 Poetry Notes

The original Fleur-de-lis is a document in verse of the select poetry of Emily Isaacson that was sent to Prince William over five years, beginning in 2005. The three volume collection of poetry composing The Fleur-de-lis is Canadiana literature in bloom: the sea, the stars, and the North all appear at Emily’s eloquent table. Her work with the First Nations people has inspired the poetry that depicts the nuances of their mythology and culture. She references a history of spiritual touch as a key to the monarchy, their past and future, and relates it to the coin, symbolic of the touch-piece.

The Fleur-de-lis is a partaking of a spiritual renaissance, defined by the cloistering and chastisement of martyrdom itself.  Here you will experience the richness and depth of the poet’s diametrically established and ordered world. Her unique commentary sings unlike a soloist in a gothic cathedral, into the silence of history and amidst the shackles of depravity.

Piecing together the journey of royalty from humble beginning to glittering coronation, the poet ebbs and flows like the wild madonna of the sea, given to birth and pierced by nature. The language of verse speaks as most cherished medium, chronicling human nature in the realm of both politics and passion.

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 From The Fleur-de-lis...

The Fleur-de-lis offers a panoramic investigation of landscapes both spiritual and physical, guiding the reader among the thematic elements of the three volumes. Their collective continuity describe a genre evoking deep imagination for the purpose of facilitating communication between not only the author and reader, but persons, nations and people groups. The art of words, nuance, and poetic device stand out in these free verse pieces, with the poetry as a whole scribing an impressive sensory, sensual universe, a visual documentary in words.

 Ideas that are prominent across the collection, in broad strokes, also provide points for discussion. First is the idea of the deified feminine, and further, of women who are fairly or unfairly persecuted as symbolic representations of a particular idea, creed, or time. Similarly, the notion of the literary heroine—we see the continual presence of Shakespeare’s women in Isaacson’s text, and this offers a linkage to women being woven (another recurrent metaphor) into the fabric of the nation—both the national body and its literary representations as same. Isaacson’s resituating and interrogating of female figures and the purpose they serve, has the implicit tie to ideas of woman as poet.

Second, the interplay between different types of worship—our veneration, frequently unquestioned, for landscape; the more programmatic veneration that takes place during a church worship service; veneration for country, themes which come out powerfully in “House of Gold” where the history of the First Nations is inter-woven with a new faith, a new creed and a new nationalism as opposed to the anti-nationalism which equates to the opposite of worship.

Thirdly, in addition to different types of worship, different types of faith are discussed: personal faith in a person, an ideal or a dream is contrasted with more proscriptive types of faith, particularly organized religion and—even more particularly—Christian orthodoxy. We see in the theme a foreshadowing of the loss of a particular style of faith in the face of a new landscape upon which that faith had to be practiced.

Fourthly, the constellations, in their perpetual slate for interpretation, reinterpretation amid fixity and their influence on the destinies of humans play into the narrative of times when the stars, the sea and the land were both sustenance and barriers to survival.

The inspirations for Isaacson’s poetry are derived from literature, images, photographs, and nature. The poems of her childhood and teenage years through the end of university are included in “Oracle of the Stone” as a testament to the early days of her writing; one can see her progression as a poet from this point at which she first knew that to write was paramount destiny. The consequences of that choice showed her true colors as a fine character to discuss both pathos and its ramifications for the human race—when suffering is imparted for spiritual, moral, or metaphysical reasons, we also see the transformation of suffering into artwork, the harnessing of the transcendent.