Catherine Owen, a heavy-metal bassist and poet, was once poet laureate for the Burnaby Hospice Society.

This sounds like, well ... a very heavy artistic endeavour. Certainly not for the faint-hearted.

Yet Owen adored her gig at hospice, where she also helped out as a general volunteer. After all, death, mourning and loss are constant themes in her poetry. And her metal band Helgrind delves "with apocalyptic ferocity into a fusion of doom, folk and death."

At the hospice, relatives of the dead and dying provided her with autobiographical stories. Owen would then pen poems, later recited at funerals.

The 38-year-old poet -- who'll read on Monday in Victoria from her poetry collection -- recalled in particular one woman at hospice who suffered from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). She could communicate only by batting her eyelids and moving one foot.

"I'd have to try to decode what she was trying to say to me," Owen said. She found the entire hospice experience tremendously interesting and helpful in her writing.

Owen has a master's degree in English and six volumes of published poetry. She's an artist who, in the words of Robert Frost, has taken the road "less travelled." The Vancouver native said she's the only poet she knows who plays heavy metal, an especially ferocious form of rock music notorious for its titanic power and ear-splitting volume.

Owen was not only lyricist/singer/bassist for Helgrind, but black-metal band Inhuman. When I caught up with her at her home in Edmonton, it sort of sounded like Helgrind and Inhuman were kaput -- at least as far as Owen is concerned. She'd split up with her boyfriend (a member of both bands) and was about to return to Vancouver, where she plans to explore new musical ventures. When she took my call, Owen was packing boxes.

The metal/poetry relationship is intriguing. To me, the two artistic endeavours seem complete opposites. Perhaps I'm speaking out of ignorance, not being a heavy metal fan. (I keep imagining burly, long-haired dudes in black leather jackets perched in a daisy-dotted meadow, pencils poised, waiting for the muse to strike.)

Owen said that, for her, writing poetry and playing heavy metal are not so dissimilar. She likes to infuse all her creative endeavours with a ferocious energy.

"For me, being a poet is being a 'word musician,' " Owen said. "I like fierceness in language and in music."

Many lyrics she wrote for Inhuman were inspired by the late American poet Robinson Jeffers, who is also an key influence on her poetry. Popular in the 1920s and '30s, Jeffers was a reclusive outdoorsman who embraced the philosophy of inhumanism. It espouses the belief that people are too self-absorbed to appreciate the world's beauty, particularly the natural world.

Owen's new poetry book Frenzy, published by Anvil Press, revolves around the theme of muses. One of Owen's own longtime muses seems an unlikely choice. Her friend Frank Bonneville was a Montreal death-metal bassist and photographer. Bonneville, who died six years ago, was drug-addicted and schizophrenic. Yet for years, he served as Owen's artistic inspiration; she "constantly" wrote poems about him.

"He had all kinds of issues to deal with," she said. "I was drawn to his energy. He was a very intense person. ... A lot of people would say, 'Oh, his energy is so dark and gloomy and I hate being around him.' For some reason, it just completely inspired me in a frenzied way."

Owen will read from Frenzy (sorry, no heavy metal on the menu) in the Collard Room at Swans Hotel on Monday at 7 p.m. The event also marks the launch of the novel Kaspoit! by Dennis E. Bolen, who also will be reading.