Rainbow Stage-Manchuria

Steve Noyes was raised in Winnipeg and educated at Carleton University and the University of British Columbia. He has published seven books and more than 150 poems, stories and reviews. He has travelled extensively in Asia and is a long-time student of Arabic and Mandarin. Steve makes his home in Victoria, where he is a senior policy analyst and writing instructor at the Ministry of Health. He is married to the poet Catherine Greenwood.

Rainbow Stage-Manchuria, Steve Noyes? fifth collection, sees him return to the long poem twice over, displaying his range and inventiveness. ?ainbow Stage?presents a 1973 rock concert in real time by the psychedelic Winnipeg band ?he Next.?This sly mlange of panoramic action, wicked lyrics and deft character sketches is a broad wink at the conventions of rock and the silly cosmologies of the seventies. Daydream and raise your Bic lighters along with The Next as they ask, Where does childhood end? ?anchuria?is a long, sarcastic lament by an exiled woman in Northern China who explores the possibilities of alternative histories. ?anchuria?is sweet and sad, a testimony for our age on the scarring of a voice by time. And a third section, ?he Marais, ?brings together Noyes? shorter riffs on dystopias, medical policy, raptors, and the dramas of human and family frailty. Rainbow Stage-Manchuria, with its layers of play, is nothing short of a world.