Shirin and Salt Man / Nilofar Shidmehr

ISBN 978-088982-246-7 • 160 pp • $17.95 • pb • April 2008 • Poetic Novella

Shirin and Salt Man is a novella in verse, which tells the story of a young modern day Iranian woman, Shirin. She is an ordinary girl from Kermanshah born before the Islamic Revolution, who imagines herself to be an incarnation of princess Shirin, depicted in the ancient Persian classic Shirin and Khosro. At first she tries to shape her life to that of the myth, but later decides to change her destiny and become the author of her own story. She leaves her husband and runs away with the Salt Man, a 1700 year old mummy on display at the Iranian National Museum in Tehran. The poems form a compelling narrative of the life of a contemporary Iranian woman whose voice has been muted by Khosro, her fundamentalist and traditional husband. In an environment where the dominance of men is written in stone and where only men have the authority for fashioning and telling stories, Shirin reclaims a place for herself as a lover and teller of stories. She re-enters life through cracks of narrative to invent Shirin anew, one whose life-path radically diverges from that of her namesake, Shirin of Nezami’s story. She digs out Farhad, the mythical lover of princess Shirin, who has now become the Salt Man, from under the dust and stones of history and she gives him another opportunity to love her. In transforming Salt Man to another Farhad, Shirin creates a new history—one shaped and narrated by a feminine voice.

Nilofar Shidmehr was born and raised in Iran, and has lived in Canada since 1997. She holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and is currently working on her PhD at the Center for Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education. Her work has been featured in both Iranian and Canadian literary magazines, including Descant, A Room of One's Own, West Coast Line, Galleon, and the Shahrvand, a widely-read Iranian newspaper published in Toronto and Vancouver.

The House Of The Easily Amused / Shelley A. Leedahl

ISBN 978-088982-239-9 • 128 pp • $17.95 • pb • April 2008 • Poetry

Where is home? What, and who, constitutes family? Why does one sometimes feel more at home when away? With the poet’s sensibility and the pilgrim’s resolve, Leedahl’s complementary evocations of disparate people and landscapes—both faraway and familiar—put traditional concepts to the test.

In poems that brim with wonder and all manners of awe, the natural world serves as touchstone wherever the poet roams. Mexico offers phosphorescent words in the sand’s wet skin; there’s snow-light and a drawbridge of stillness before an elk charges in Banff; squirrels in Saskatchewan make intermittent appearances as if they’re extras on a movie set; there’s no one minding the greenhouse in Scotland, where the grapes have gone wonderfully mad; and in Ireland, a battered heart still gives a little kick over red, mouse-nibbled mushrooms. You won’t find the “house” from the book’s title on any particular map. Its metaphoric doors open into rooms of both love and lament, as they must, and the “easily amused” are all those who follow the faint hope of deer trails, wear mismatched socks, or rejoice in the sky’s infinite game of Lite-Brite. You know, they’re those fortunate souls who venture outside the fence of their lives, and leave the blue gate swinging.

Shelley A. Leedahl is the author of two novels, two short story collections, two previous books of poetry, and an illustrated children’s book. She has been awarded the John V. Hicks Manuscript Award, a Short Grain Award, Foreword Magazine’s “Book of the Year”, and more than a dozen Saskatchewan Writers Guild awards in various genres, including literary non-fiction. Two of her titles have been shortlisted for “Book of the Year” (Saskatchewan Book Awards). As well, she was one of five Canadian writers selected for the Canada-Mexico Writing/Photography Exchange in Mérida (Mexico) and Banff. She lives in the village of Middle Lake, Saskatchewan.

“Amidst the banality of suburban life, the ordinariness of domesticity, [Leedahl] grounds a fierce love of beauty, of the moment’s transcendence, of the lonely soul making its peace with the world. She’s not saying, Look at me, she’s saying, Look at this. Out of love, and care for the reader, as evidenced by her careful craft and camera eye, her poems show us a way to see, and an admirable way to be in the world.”

—John Donlan, Author
of Green Man, Baysville, and Domestic Economy.

The Incorrection / George McWhirter

Finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, BC Book Prizes 2008

ISBN 0-88982-243-3 • ISBN13 978-088982-243-6 • 176 pp $17.95 • pb • September 2007 • Poetry

From Sasamat Street in Vancouver to Samoa, the fish, fowl and animals ask what we are up to with our fixings, our vegetarian dressings-up of salad and tofu to make them meat enough for us. Will that change the flux of our existence on the planet, the flow of everything in the old world into memory—from primary instinct into new good intentions, which turn into coils of the hangman’s rope, dangling over every deed—like mistletoe, waiting for the farewell kiss to all that, at low-cal Christmas, or next diet-mined and minded fest? The poems and the personae fight the battle between fat and thin, rhyme and un-rhyme, merely to find that love and poetry don’t care what shape or form we’re in, so long as we’re subject to the natural Law of Incorrection: In trying to correct an old wrong/I seem to create a new one/and find myself arraigned/by a hapless incorrection.

Born in 1939 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, George McWhirter grew up on the Shankill Road. He attended Queen’s University in Belfast, where his classmates included Seamus Heaney, and later completed a Masters degree at the University of British Columbia. McWhirter lived in Spain from 1965 to 1966, when he moved to Canada where he taught high school in Port Alberni, making an abrupt transition from Barcelona to living in a log cabin by Sproat Lake. He is the author of twenty books, many of which have won major awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the MacMillan Prize for Poetry, the Canadian Chapbook Poetry Competition Winner, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the FR Scott Prize for Translation.

In 2005, George McWhirter retired as a professor in the Creative Writing Department at UBC. In 2007 he was inaugurated as the first Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver.

"McWhirter’s apprehension of nature partakes of the intensity and visionary quality of medieval Irish poetry; in this he is akin to Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. But a sardonic humour utterly his own leavens the tenderness . . ."
— Books In Canada

"To sit with George . . . takes one into the ancient world of oral recounting, as the tales of Irish life pour out in an Ulster English as soft as rainwater, the voice rising and falling, sometimes as low as a whisper."
— George Woodcock

"George McWhirter's flashes assert transcendent meaning, with a literalness that seems almost medieval."
— Malahat Review

Other Oolichan titles by George McWhirter:

• The Book of Contradictions
• A Staircase For All Souls

Along A Snake Fence Riding / W. H. New

ISBN 0-88982-236-0 • ISBN13 978-088982-236-8 • 96 pp $17.95 • pb • September 2007 • Poetry

Along a Snake Fence Riding is a long poem for eight voices. One of these voices is that of the narrator, who steps into the poem “from time to time” to record a life of intention and ambition, resistance and refusal, byways of discovery and decision, and continuing persistence. Other voices speak “out of time.” These are the voices of memory and experience, flooding back in fragments, recalling moments in a life (or the moments of living) — not in chronological sequence but by association, as though set in motion by the senses, or by the twisting circuits of thought. In the background, constant but often ignored, is the last of the eight voices, the voice of the clock, which carries time forward even while the mind is collapsing duration into momentariness, refusing the conventions of sequence, and revisiting the past as though it were happening even now.

The poem is, in short, a meditation on time and memory, and on the science of time and memory: rich in allusion and eloquent in imagery, wide-ranging and yet remarkable in its close attention to detail. The poem invites readers not just to follow the life that is imagined on these pages but to venture into their own lives, discover the joy and the pain of living in connection — in connection with other people, with love and loss, and with the environment we sometimes ignore and yet always call home.

Along a Snake Fence Riding is an experience, a visceral, emotional experience, that calls the reader to follow the fence line wherever it irregularly wanders, to immerse in the river it follows, to engage with the music of the language and discover, too, the possibility of celebration.

W. H. New is the author of a wide range of books, including several books for children, the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, Underwood Log (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry), and Touching Ecuador. His writing has received wide recognition, including the Lorne Pierce Medal and the Governor General’s International Award in Canadian Studies. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006. Along a Snake Fence Riding is his eighth book of poetry. While some of his earlier work took readers travelling around the world, this new collection takes them time-travelling: into the workings of narrative and memory.

Father Tongue / Danielle Lagah

0-88982-235-2 • 112 pp • $17.95 • pb• April 2007• Poetry

Father Tongue is a poetic exploration of one family’s Indo-Canadian immigrant experience. The family’s stories of life in India and Canada are told in several voices, but the lens through which they are focused is the consciousness of the narrator — a young woman of mixed blood who is seeking to find her footing between two conflicting worlds. Bringing together the legends, secrets, and facts of her family’s history, she unearths and pieces together the stories of grief and triumph that will ultimately serve to illuminate her own truths. There is the story of Piari, her father’s sister, who was mysteriously poisoned to death at the age of seven in the family’s Indian village of Pubwan; the story of her father’s battle with a childhood illness believed to be caused by supernatural possession. And there is the story of the narrator’s own journey to the land of her ancestors — one that is marked by revelation and discovery of the purest kind. These are tales of betrayal and cruelty, death and birth, joy, and fierce love — in a word, family stories.

It’s been said that we can “reclaim truth from the lies of poetry.” Father Tongue uses the language of poetry to bridge the chasm between two cultures, two worlds separated by barriers of language, tradition, geography, history, and very different ways of viewing the world. Through poetry, the author has chosen to record, preserve, and ultimately construct her narrative.

The two worlds of the book — the dream-like landscape of far away India, and the concrete reality of the West Coast — are depicted in poems that merge verse with elements of prose and scripting, a method that serves to echo Father Tongue’s themes of disconnectedness and cultural blending.

“ Lagah’s poems are beautiful, lucid stepping stones through the rivers of imagination that surround her south Asian heritage. This is not a bridge between cultures, but a palimpsest: a document of Lagah’s own life written between the lines of inherited and witnessed stories of village, family, illness and disappearance — streams that feed a narration that began with her father’s tales of a secret garden in India. A unique, inclusive journey through the world of emigration, difference and adaptation, written with exceptional clarity.”
— Marilyn Bowering

Danielle Lagah was born in Victoria, BC. Her mother is of Scottish descent, and her father immigrated to Canada from the Punjab. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in literary journals and anthologies, and featured on CBC radio. Danielle travels to India and China several times a year for her work as a wholesale home décor buyer and stylist, a profession that allows her to constantly observe the effects and nuances of cross-culturalization. She lives in Nanoose Bay with her partner, Oakley, and their Scottish Fold cat, Zampano.

Notes For A Rescue Narrative / J. Mark Smith

0-88982-233-6 • 80 pp • $16.95 • pb• April 2007 • Poetry

Story rescues no one from death, but out of the seams and lacunae of narrative a certain kind of lyric can emerge. In Notes for a Rescue Narrative, J. Mark Smith charts the oxbow turnings of diverse human voices through scepticism and belief, hope and despair, pride and humility. Inspired by the elegiac plainness of Wordsworth as much as by the many-mindedness of Pound, Smith’s poems probe into regions of experience where meaning falls away, and “the names hardly stick.”

A middle-aged British sailor remembers, decades afterwards, a strange “human-and-not-human” incident in the colonial port of Bombay. A man walking his dog near the Katyn monument in Toronto wonders at signs, and at the “mother-deep” ocean of human suffering. In a moment “out of an airport,” the speakers and story-tellers of the Mackenzie River regroup and ready themselves, not for a rescue, but for the future. Blue jays in the pine forests of the Great Basin turn through a death-dance of forgetfulness and fecundity. A traveller on a snow-bound plane straightens his spine to bear the difficult reality of an unstoried present. A man buries his long-dead father’s alpine equipment beneath a mountain in California, and finds a new welcome in the familiar “noise of chaos.”

Notes for a Rescue Narrative moves deftly between metrical and free verse forms, and includes homages to Horace, Eugenio Montale, and Antonio Machado.

J. Mark Smith was born in Eugene, Oregon and grew up in Edmonton. After twenty-five years of living in other places, including southern California and Toronto, Smith recently returned to his home-town of Edmonton to teach in the English department at Grant MacEwan College. Smith’s poems and creative non-fiction pieces have been published in literary journals and magazines. Notes For A Rescue Narrative is his first book of poems. He holds a doctorate in English from UC Irvine, and has published scholarly articles on nineteenth and twentieth century poetry and poetics. He lives with his wife, Jennifer Stewart, and their dog, Jasper, near the North Saskatchewan river valley.

The Aviary / Miranda Pearson

0-88982-230-1 • 112 pp • $17.95 pb • June 2006

Connected by the element of air, the poems in The Aviary raise questions about desire, the spirit and the unconscious juxtaposed against the everyday, beautiful and absurd, the surface of "things." These poems propose an aesthetic of profound anxiety.

Like caged birds, they clamour for escape even as they mourn loss. The poems circle ideas of impermanence, of our inner and outer landscapes with all their diverse freedoms and imprisonments. The poems in this collection also reflect on the intimate power dynamics between men and women, employing an audacious tone of self-mockery to question the value of confession, and taking a mournfully wry view of the lyric and romantic tradition. Infidelity and betrayal are explored with stark and resolute determination, defining a philosophy of loss and attempting to delineate the ways and means of jealousy, grief and ironic ecstasy.

Throughout this collection landscape is invoked as balm, a touchstone more reliable than any human relationship. In The Aviary, we fly above the boundaries of countries, in and out of time, and our notions of sanity. We play with the imperfect process of remembrance, where artifice is defense against loss.

Miranda Pearson was born in England and came to Canada in 1991 to work as a psychiatric nurse. She is a graduate of the University of British Columbia's MFA program in Creative Writing, where she was also on faculty. Miranda is currently the poetry 'mentor' at Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio. Her poetry has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies. The Aviary is her second book of poetry.

"I delight in these poems. Their verbal strategies, their echoes and replies, their life-givingness."
— Robert Kroetsch

About Prime: " A voice that is keen, convincing and utterly captivating."
— Nadine Shelley

" . . . a remarkably strong book. If Pearson carries on as she's begun, she's just entering her prime."
– John Moore, Vancouver Sun

" Pearson's distinctive, concise phrasings maintain her own poetic identity . . . evidence of her easy humour and on-going awareness of human weakness."
– Allen Brown, Canadian Literature

Touching Ecuador / W.H. New

0-88982-223-9 • 80 pp • $16.95 pb • March 2006

Touching Ecuador is a long poem, one that follows the interconnected observations of four people: a modern-day tourist-traveller, a struggling castaway, a disillusioned preacher, and an Everyman weaver who tries to come to terms with mountain histories and a mountain home. Everywhere these observers find a landscape rich in words: guidebooks and notebooks, calendars and woven letters, alphabets and beaded rituals, children's verses and the stories that populate place. Through their experience they move past security into the blessing of contradiction, finding at last "the breath to live by, / glimpses of connection, . . . / the ambiguities of liberty."

Those who reach the peaks and shores of Ecuador, who watch and listen, will never again be the same. Some will rediscover what it means to be alive; some will try not to leave; none will ever forget; all will change. Perhaps it is the effect of the Line itself—ecuador, equator, latitude zero, the pathway of the sun. Who crosses it? Whom does it touch?

W.H. New likes to travel, and recently has enjoyed trips to Winnipeg in mid-winter, Trigance in spring, and Quito, where all seasons are one. He has written three books for children, and edited the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, among other books. W.H. New is the recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal for an achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical literature and also of the 2004 Governor General's International Award in Canadian Studies. His most recent book, Underwood Log, was short-listed for the 2005 Governor General's Award for Poetry.

Time Out Of Mind / Laurie Block

0-88982-225-5 • 112 pp • $17.95 pb • June 2006

In the foreword to this moving, honest and luminous collection of poems, Laurie Block inscribes the last coherent words his mother said to him: I used to be quite fond of you. Shortly after that, she lost what remained of her senses and sank into the vegetative state in which she spent her last years. Lights Out, the first section of Time Out of Mind, is the poet's journey into a darkness that is only in part his mother's.

He writes to touch the borders of consciousness and emerges with a map of the mind and body in extremis. Many of these poems are rooted in disorientation, displacement and loss of equilibrium, the friction between what happens outside the skin and what may be taking place on the inside. The poet believes that we value consciousness as somehow more concrete, enduring and linked to assumptions about identity than our bodies.

He therefore asks the question: Is the self first a face or a soul? In the middle section, We Chemists of Grief, the poems address those who have come through the darkness to die and grieve well. These poems reveal the truth that healing is possible even in the absence of a cure. In moving beyond fear, anger, regret and disassociation fall away. It becomes possible to live and die in peace, fully alive and present to what each day might bring, to what had been and is no more.

The poems in the final section, Coming to my Senses, are offered as a celebration of living and dying and the naming of desire. In describing them, Block says: "I'm not ashamed of the naked romanticism, the disposition to gratitude and hope, even in the absence of a guarantee. No more will I hesitate to ask for what I want or give what I can. To ache for this earth and all that inhabit it, for the love that makes sense of living and makes room for death; for the words that bring comfort and the memories that give heat and light."

Laurie Block is a poet, playwright and storyteller. He was born in Winnipeg and now lives in Brandon, Manitoba. His previous work includes a chapbook of poetry, Governing Bodies, and a bilingual collection of poems, Foreign Graces/Bendiciones Ajenas, based on his experiences in South America. He is also the author of a full-length play, The Tomato King, produced by Theatre Projects of Manitoba in 1997, and a short piece, Pop! His short story, While the Librarian Sleeps, won the 2003 Prairie Fire fiction contest and, most recently, The National Magazine Award Gold Medal for fiction.

Cartography / Rhona McAdam

0-88982-221-2 • 80 pp • $16.95 pb • March 2006

In Cartography, her fifth collection of poetry, Rhona McAdam weaves an imaginative passage through the territories of love, work, family and aging. The journeys she takes her readers on are odd, familiar and memorable: we travel with her through startling and sensuous reflections on love, office paperwork and corporate layoffs; teen murder, truck stops and dementia.

Here we find poems about suitcases, shoes and vegetables imbued with the same wry compassion with which she suffuses her portraits of aging parents and meditations on marital status and childlessness. The world of her poems is completely and evocatively imagined, with humour and humanity, but also a sense of control, and bears traces of the poet's own movements, from England through Europe and back to Canada. Her themes are never overstated, and reveal themselves cumulatively through the course of the collection. With a mature and original command of her craft, she reveals a sensitivity to form, and to the ways rhyme and meter can enrich a poem.

Rhona McAdam was born in Duncan — a great-granddaughter of the town's namesake — and grew up on Vancouver Island. She has divided her adult life between Edmonton, Alberta and London, England. She moved to Victoria in 2002. She has worked in Canada, England and throughout Europe. For several years she cooked at Strawberry Creek Lodge in Alberta, where Rudy Wiebe and his family still run retreats for writers and other groups. Her poetry has been published in Canada, the US, Ireland and England.

Stumbling in the Bloom / John Pass

0-88982-201-8 • 7 x 8½ • 120 pp • $17.95 • May 2005

Congratulations to John Pass, winner of the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for Stumbling in the Bloom.

The poems in Stumbling in the Bloom engage the ever-present enticements and entanglements of beauty on life’s, and art’s, home ground — in wilderness and garden. But this surprising volume, the finale of John Pass’s quartet of poetry books, At Large, takes intriguing side trips on the home-stretch, including a wry excursion to the chiropractor, a fanciful flight from a student driver’s parallel parking practice, up an “Everest” in Alberta, and on a singularly moving Canadian journey towards and away from the “ground zero” of the 9/11 tragedy. The book, and Pass’s aesthetic, come to rest finally on a fulcrum, a paradox, of acceptance: the embrace of uncertainty and (un)happy accident that purpose and effort alone make possible.

“Pass truly qualifies as the best writer in Canada you never heard of until now.”
— John Moore, The Vancouver Sun.

“John Pass balances intellect and humility in Stumbling in the Bloom. His poems celebrate the natural world, while painting portraits of our flawed but singular “ human family.”
— Judges’ Citation, GG Awards.

“What makes Pass’s work so satisfying to me is that he appears always to be working out his understanding of, and relationship to, nature rather than posing or pontificating.”
— Gary Geddes, BC Bookworld.

John Pass was born in 1947 in Sheffield, England and has lived in Canada since 1953. He has a BA in English from the University of British Columbia (1969) and teaches at Capilano College in Sechelt and North Vancouver. Fourteen books and chapbooks of his work have been published and his poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, and abroad. In 1988 he won the Canada Poetry Prize. He has won awards from The League of Canadian Poets, the BC Federation of Writers and the BC Arts Council, and has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. Pass was the recipient in 2001 of the Gillian Lowndes Award. His previous books, The Hour's Acropolis and Water Stair, were short listed for The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Water Stair was also short listed for the Governor General’s Award. John Pass lives near Sakinaw Lake on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast with his wife, writer Theresa Kishkan.

Also by John Pass:

0-88982-179-8 Water Stair $14.95

0-88982-213-1 • 5½ x 8½ • 68 pp $16.95 • October 2005

Following the last months of her husband’s life McIntosh writes about her passage through the disorientation of diagnosis, the discomfort of a new reality, the amazement that almost anything can become routine, until eventually "sadness gives way/pressed lightly/into new love. " The poems in Liminal Space are poignant and honest, touched with ambivalence, emotion and spirituality.

These poems speak the often silent questions: Whose death am I grieving? How do you help someone to die? Will he know me at the end? Through an artist’s vision, small details and everyday events become significant. These are poems of the liminal, the in-between space characterized by unease and challenge where, within the grief of separation, relationship itself is remade. These are poems at the edge of the known world where birth and death, humans and divinity constellate. “Some days I’m with him near the end/unsure if I’m reaching up or down/and some days I’m the hinge/for a flock of geese./Wide open. Flying.”

Leanne McIntosh was born in Regina Saskatchewan. Liminal Space is her second full-length collection of poems. Leanne has lived in Nanaimo, BC, for thirty-five years and now spends several months of the year in Montreal.

0-88982-211-5 • 5½ x 8½ • 96pp $17.95 • October 2005

In The Thing About Dying, Tremblay reflects on the nature of dying and death. Her subjects include old men and younger brothers, sisters and mothers, as well as reflections on the deaths inflicted by murderous cats. We stroke her, we provide refuge/but she isn’t one of us.//She doesn’t need her food gutted/or skinned or plucked.//With ease, she sinks her teeth/into small bodies,//buries her face in red pulp./She deals directly.

Tremblay writes with irreverent humour and luminous insight about the perils of religion and the powerful connection between sex and soul. The thing about dying is/I won’t get over it.//I can’t say, well/that sure taught me a lesson--/let’s go home and have a drink./Impossible to believe/in my own ending./

Mildred Tremblay was born in Kenora, Ontario. She has won many awards for her writing including the League of Canadian Poets Award, The Arc National Poetry Award and the Orillia Award for humour. She recently won the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival Award for poetry. Her collection of short fiction Dark Forms Gliding was published by Oolichan Books, as was her first collection of poetry Old Woman Comes Out of Her Cave.

0-88982-203-4 • 5½ x 8½ • 96 pp • $17.95• September 2005

Then Again, the long title piece at the centre of this début collection, plays with the possibilities of making something of a life. What gets made is first of all a moving word picture that is neither verse nor prose, but an alternating dance between them.

A sequence of short chronological poems composed in biblical “versets” pushes at the limits of lyric and tries to recall the discontinuous succession of years from the poet’s birth until about age sixteen, just before he receives his driver’s license and finds himself entering the on-ramp of North American adulthood.

Repeatedly interrupting the lyric narrative like a big-rig cutting in front of a bike are ten prose musings that ignore chronology and range freely about the highways and back roads of social and historical as well as personal and family memory.

Most of these musings take their departure from life-changing moments—the unremembered fact of circumcision, the half-remembered process of learning to read, the long-remembered first kiss—but they use those moments to pursue their larger-than-personal implications.

Set against the title piece are a number of lyric poems, some of which echo its main themes, others of which go their own way into other territory.

Iain Higgins was born and raised in Vancouver. He holds a BA (Hons.) and an MA in English Literature from UBC, and a PhD from Harvard University. He now teaches English and Medieval Studies at the University of Victoria, and lives in Saanich with his partner and two children. From 1995-2003, he was Poetry Editor for the journal Canadian Literature. In 1987, he was awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize.

The Startled Heart / Eve Joseph

0-88982-191-7 • 5½ x 8½ • 64 pp. $15.95 • April 2004

There are many influences that coalesce in the writing of a poem; if we’re lucky something opens in us and language breaks through in ways we had not anticipated. For Joseph, it was the ghazal that threw open the gate and let everything in. At the heart of this form is a lightness, a touch that barely settles before it moves on. It was this quick touch that allowed her to write of loss without the full weight of sorrow. Recent dead appear in these poems alongside old ghosts; last breaths became indistinguishable from lost songs and details surfaced from long ago encounters with people the poet has loved.
The poems are variations in that they do not adhere strictly to the tenets of the form but move according to its inherent spirit. These ghazals induce reverie and yet argue against the revered. They provide a way to hold the spiritual and the physical in the same realm: to see the light as it’s leaving.

Eve Joseph was born in 1953 and grew up in North Vancouver. As a young woman she worked on freighters and traveled widely before moving to Vancouver Island where she now lives in Brentwood Bay. She holds an M.A. in Counseling Psychology and works at Victoria Hospice.

The Startled Heart was short-listed for the 2005 Dorothy Livesay Award, BC Book Prizes.

Underwood Log / W.H. New

0-88982-193-3 • 5½ x 8½ • 132 pp. • $17.95 • June 2004

This book-length poem, reminiscent of Oscar Peterson’s Canadiana Suite or William Carlos Williams' Paterson, is sweeping in its grasp of human and natural geography. It is a poem that circles the globe, crossing meridians with amazing insight and understanding, recording discoveries with delight and wonder, and connecting places to which the poet has travelled back to his home and his heart. It is a poem of exploration, as rich as any archaeological dig; a poem of stunning musicality, imagination and intellect. Every word selected with care, with precision and integrity.

W.H. New was born in Vancouver and attended UBC and the University of Leeds. Currently Professor Emeritus in the UBC English Department, he is an internationally recognized expert on Canadian and Commonwealth literary traditions and considered the premier scholar of Canadian Literature today. He is the editor of the recently published Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. W.H. New is the recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal and also of the 2004 Governor General’s International Award in Canadian Studies.

The Spell of Memory / Ilya Tourtidis

0-88982-195-X • 5½ x 8½ • 128 pp. • $17.95 • June 2004

Memory is the sweetest of all inducements. It takes hold of us...our senses, our strangeness, our appetites, our desires. And it is through memory that we are able to move through the terrain that makes us visible as individuals who have it within their power to re-author their experiences. Indeed the response to memory is the response to life and its meaning.

In The Spell of Memory, Tourtidis has framed the structures that have defined his life...what he felt...what he gained...what he has lost, in a literary tradition that is as archaic as time itself. He has done this by adopting the persona of a narrative witness who is himself an integral contributor to the drama he observes. And what a surprise it has been. There on the charmed surfaces of his remembering, he was awed by something that was both arousing and arresting at the same time...the numinous coalesced into a lyrical history of sound...seductive, enticing...even beguiling, as it should, for these poems form the diaphanous canopy of the spell.

Co-winner of the 1993 Gerald Lampert Award, Ilya Tourtidis was born in Greece and now lives in Royston, B.C.

A Plot of Light / Susan McCaslin

0-88982-197-6 • 5½ x 8½ 128 pp. $17.95 • 2004

A Plot of Light charts a contemplative journey in which the world of visionary dreaming lies along a continuum with the real. These are poems in the Christian contemplative tradition, tracing the arc of the everyday mystic, baffled and blessed by moments of connection with a larger, more comprehensive mind.

The poems form a quaternary, beginning with a series of visionary dreams, then exploring the dreamer as pilgrim treading the sites of poet-contemplative Thomas Merton’s birthplace in Southern France. These poems integrate moments of transcendence into the sharper light of the everyday, and the volume ends with an elegiac sequence about the decline and death of the poet’s father, in which the world of the dead is inseparable from the world of the living.

“Lyrical, sorrowful, joyful and translucent, this is a book of spiritual and lyrical mastery.” –Harold Rhenisch

“. . . an authentic individual movement into the intricacies of spiritual awareness . . . the signature note I hear in her poems is one of tenderness, loving tenderness for the members of her family, for her teachers, for words themselves, for what is beyond words. . . .” –Russell Thornton

Susan McCaslin teaches English at Douglas College in Coquitlam, B.C. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry and the editor of two poetry anthologies. She lives in Langley, B.C. with her husband and daughter.

Leaving the Narrow Place / Dorothy Field

ISBN 0-88982-199-2 / 128 pages; October 2004 / $17.95 pb

Leaving the Narrow Place is a meditation on home and homelessness, weaving together several strands of dislocation. The poet recalls growing up in a Jewish home where there wasn't much that was Jewish, and explores her ancestral culture, as well as the pain of feeling unseen.

These are poems of rural life, of orchard blossoms, tomatoes, and beet greens. Throughout, the seasonal cycles in the wild and cultivated world are touchstones for connection. June, the month when the hay is cut and baled, is a metaphor for times of change and transformation. At that threshold moment, the poet encounters various visitors to her hayfield: Ophelia, Groucho Marx, St. Francis, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas, among others. The scythe cuts down everything in its path-grass, snakes and voles, even the hayer herself-as it makes way for new growth. Ultimately, the poems are about finding one's home in mystery, in elk's breath, owl calls, and the opening of the heart.

Field's first book of poems is remarkable for the depth and breadth of her vision, the way in which she weaves together her personal and family narratives with the political, cultural and social history of the Jews. The poems flow from emotions to ideas, from story to myth-making, using a variety of unique forms and in language that is always vivid, rich and multi-layered.

Dorothy Field was born in New York. She has lived and farmed on Vancouver Island for more than thirty years.

Hannah and the Holy Fire / K. Louise Vincent

0-88982-187-9• 5½ X 8½ • 64 pp. $15.95 • 2003

Hannah and the Holy Fire is a narrative poem in three voices. It is the story of a young refugee from Bosnia who arrives in Canada with her mother to stay with a friend on the West Coast. Their journeys through tensions of unrest, belonging, refuge, dream and dislocation lead Hannah to a physical and metaphysical sense of home that embraces tattooing, escape into the natural world, and her growing love of the unknown.

The poems in this book reflect Hannah’s wild cohesiveness and bright darkness as she crosses and re-crosses the borders between light and shadow, pain and joy, the violent dispersal and the quietly ecstatic re-formation of her world.

K. Louise Vincent was born in Pine Falls, Manitoba. As a community activist and therapist, she devoted many years to social change and alternatives to violence rooted in feminist and non-violence ethics. She is the author of Transforming Abuse: Non-violent Resistance and Recovery, published by New Society Press; and several of her poems have been published in literary journals and chapbooks, including The Letter Poems (written with Joanne Thorvaldson). K. Louise now lives on Gabriola Island.

Night Room / W. H. New

0-88982-226-3 • 5½ X 8½ • 72 pp. $15.95 • 2003

In this book-length poem, W. H. New uses the metaphor of Snowman to represent the alternative self, the alter-ego, the doppelganger. Here we encounter the cold version of the warm person.

Throughout this book, the narrative voice searches for the intrinsic harmony that lies within each individual. New suggests that our fear of anarchy causes us to create rigid boundaries within which we attempt to find order. Yet ironically it is the disorderliness of the human spirit and the natural world, which alone can save us from isolation and despair. Freedom lies in our ability to balance our inner needs and desires with those external forces which oppose our deepest longings—forces imposed upon us by the very nature of our industrialized world.

Night Room explores the sometimes surreal world of isolation and paralytic despair, the delay between observation and action. Rich in image and painfully exact, these poems reverberate with a wry humour, reaching finally towards the balance of musical composition.

W. H. New was born in Vancouver and attended UBC and the University of Leeds. For eighteen years, he was the editor of the distinguished critical quarterly, Canadian Literature. He has lectured and taught in Australia, India, Italy, China, France and the USA, and held the Brenda & David MacLean Chair in Canadian Studies at UBC.

The Burning Eaves / David Manicom

0-88982-202-6 5½ X 8½ • 78 pp. $15.95 April 2003

In his fourth collection of poems, David Manicom affirms his place as one of the most compelling poets writing in Canada today. The Burning Eaves, a mixture of shorter lyrics and longer sequences, is a meditation on the nature of language and the power of love. Things are never as they appear to be, in Manicom’s world; yet he is a trustworthy guide, who steers us through a poetic geography, from chaos to the edge of our longing for order.

As a poet, he is forever inhabiting more than one myth, as he uses the mathematics of interplanetary physics and astronomy to explore the universe of intimate objects and the particularities of our daily lives. Our journey through these poems is one of twists and turns, through sudden, surprising shifts that are mesmerizing in the way they reveal how we experience the world in language and thought, how we process irony in coping with our inexorable sadness and our search for grace.

“No poet in our country writes so superbly, so exactingly.” —George Elliott Clarke

David Manicom grew up in rural Ontario, has lived in Moscow, Islamabad, and Beijing, and now lives with his family in Quebec. He is the author of three acclaimed collections of poetry, a collection of short stories which won the Prix Parizeau, and an award-winning non-fiction title, Progeny of Ghosts: Travels In Russia and The Old Empire.

The Burning Eaves, was short-listed for the 2004 Governor General’s Award.

The Sound The Sun Makes / by Leanne McIntosh

0-88982-218-2 • 5½ X 8½ • 80 pp. $15.95 • April 2003

The Sound The Sun Makes introduces a remarkable new poetic voice in Leanne McIntosh. McIntosh tenderly and fearlessly examines themes of old age and the love which flourishes in the midst of everyday sorrows. Lush and sensual, these poems evoke a time and place in Canada’s history—Saskatchewan before and during the second world war—while drawing us ever deeper into those truths which remain universal through all times and places.

Riverbook & Ocean / W. H. New

$14.95 • ISBN 0-88982-208-5 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 88 pp

This fourth collection of poems by W.H. New once again invites the reader to witness the ordinary, fraught with human frailty, uncertainty and risk, while revealing a world of extraordinary, if transient, natural beauty and diversity. Fiercely refusing to skim the surface, New confronts our despair with lightness, grace and humour. He pulls us in, engages us with the particulars of place, of Vancouver. And he offers in contrast the explorative and nomadic nature of man, from Captain Vancouver exploring the convergence of river and ocean to a young boy on a bridge caught between decision and action.

The Book of Contradictions /George McWhirter

$16.95 • ISBN 0-88982-206-9 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 164 pages

The Book Of Contradictions is a journey through the mountains and valleys of the heart, through territory as exotic as Birds of Paradise and as familiar and musical as rain. It is a journey into the landscapes of childhood and youth, marriage and fatherhood. Ireland and Canada dance cheek to cheek here, West Coast and Prairie tango together, memory and myth mingle in a single, silky mist.
 This is a book to be savored and returned to in different moods, at different times of day, different stages of life — a book to be discovered slowly, like a child, or a lover. The music and wit of these poems will delight you, but you’ll return to them for the depth of their wisdom and the fragrance of the poet’s infinite tenderness towards frail and fumbling humanity.

Love Songs For A Tender God / Hiro Boga

$14.95 • ISBN 0-88982-216-6 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 96 pages

The poems in Love Songs For A Tender God are a coming together of the various threads of an essential story, a complete cycle, in which one person’s vision of the universal mandala, of the Divine, is affirmed. This is a munificent and tender God who embraces us no matter how small or insignificant we might think we are; a God who rejoices in the wholeness of our being. Here are prayers for a secular world, where the divine greets us with a “boundless, boundless welcome.”

In this her first book of poems, Hiro Boga blends classical and contemporary styles in a poetry that is inspiring, intimate and passionate.

Mars Is For Poems / Aaron Bushkowsky

$14.95 • ISBN 0-88982-204-2 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 104 pages

This collection of poetry zings a meteor’s path from cosmos to earth, from the great themes of love and death to their very particular manifestations—the death of a parent, the dissolution of a marriage, love’s awakening in triumph and hope, the grief and confusion of love lost, love distorted into hate. In his poems, sound weaves rhythmic patterns, anchoring the reader the way a drumbeat anchors a piece of music, freeing the melody to soar. Stars and galaxies, planets and their moons, gods and goddesses are linked through human consciousness to everyday lives, to the wonder of new love, the shout of mortality.

The Elders' Palace / Margo Button with Natasha Thorpe

$14.95 • ISBN 0-88982-214-X • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 60 pages

Two cultures meet on the common ground of parenthood, and of children lost, dead, or dying. In these poems, Margo Button documents her meetings with Inuit elders and families in Kitikmeot, in the Canadian Arctic. The stories they tell are heartbreaking, the fruit of a harsh land. The poems weave the stories of the Inuit with the story of the poet’s own schizophrenic son, who stabbed himself to death when he was 26 years old.

This is a bilingual book: the elders asked that Button’s poems be translated into Inuinnaqtun. The translations were done by Mary Kasoni, and illustrated with ink drawings by Inuit artists Bella Kapolak and Mary Kilaodluk.

Even a Stone Breathes / Winona Baker

$13.95 • ISBN 0-88982-181-X • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 74 pages.

A long-awaited collection of new haiku and senryu from Winona Baker, who has won many international literary awards for her writing. In 1989 she won the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Grand Prize for the top haiku among entries submitted from around the world. The prize was presented to her during the World Haiku Festival in Yamagata, Japan, held in celebration of the 300 year anniversary of Matsuo Basho’s famous work, Oku No Hosomichi. Baker’s work has been featured on featured on Radio Japan’s “Haiku Corner,” on CBC’s “Morningside” and on “Gabereau.”

green girl dreams Mountains / by Marilyn Dumont

Price $14.95 • ISBN 0-88982-200-X • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 98 pages

This wonderful book of poems is the winner of the 2002 Writer's Guild of Alberta Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry.

green girl dreams Mountains is a book of many parts, a book of overarching vision. This new collection of poems by Marilyn Dumont is about place and family, about a mother’s love for her daughter, about a father’s sense of loss and disenfranchisement, about belonging and separation. It is a book imbued with sadness and desperation which ends in celebration. A vision of a book!

Old Woman Comes Out of Her Cave / Mildred Trembley

$14.95 • ISBN 0-88982-190-9 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 105 pages

Insightful and irreverent, Old Woman Comes Out of Her Cave explores the lives of women from birth to old age. These poems both shock and delight with their play of ideas about creation, ripening and aging. They speak of the delicious pleasures of the female body and celebrate the powerful bond between eroticism and spirituality. Tremblay speaks from her own body of experience as a woman who has birthed and raised six daughters, a woman who has transcended her generation. She explores unflinchingly the realms of religion, cultural shibboleths and sexual taboos.

Stone Rain / W.H. New

$14.95 • ISBN 0-88982-196-8 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 84 pages

Stone Rain is a triptych that investigates what it means to see. In particular, the set of three lyrical sequences ask how the artist-observer, the urban witness, and the foreign traveler all shape the world as the site of story. “The wonder is not that the indefatigable critic and editor W.H. New should be such an interesting poet but that he should have published his first collection in his late 50s, an age when most poets are closing up shop or have already left the building. His third such book, Stone Rain has elements of the other two: lyrics that are imagistic without being impressionistic, communicating the feeling of postcard precision that recalls what you expect to find when haiku hit their mark . . . a book not quite like any other.”—George Fetherling, The New Brunswick Reader

Shadows Fall Behind / Margo Button

$15.95 • ISBN 0-88982-184-4 • 5 ½ by 8 ½ • 104 pages

This second book of poems by Margo Button is a sequel to her award-winning book The Unhinging of Wings, about the suicide of her son Randall. Here are new poems about coming to terms with his death. “The images in this book work like a strong, cold current in a big lake . . . These repeated images challenge or open the weight of other poems, accumulate in suggestion, insight. . . .” —The Fiddlehead

Water Stair / John Pass

$14.95 • ISBN 88982-179-8 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 103 pages

Nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the BC Poetry Prize 2001 Winner of the Gillian Lowndes Award 2001 “Pass truly qualifies as the best writer in Canada you never heard of until now . . . His work takes a road less traveled by poets in a century dominated by the brief personal lyric . . . Pass dares to go beyond the personal lyric, weaving classical, Christian Romantic and existential threads from our eclectic culture into a narrative tapestry of language and ideas.” —John Moore, The Vancouver Sun

Raucous / W. H. New

$14.95 • ISBN 0-88982-175-5 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 84 pages

A wonderful collection of poems that draws on the language of geology and nursery rhyme to describe an arc of desire, disillusion and hope. New’s is a language of intensity and discovery; his poems are songlines that extend our experience over the maps of time and space. “New’s images and his brilliant language imbue his poems with the ability to temporarily halt the rushed city dweller into quiet reflection . . . at the end of the journey there is a dazzling array of colour and a sense of seeing nature in all her majesty for the first time.” — Quill & Quire

Climbing Croagh Patrick / Timothy Brownlow

$14.95 • 0-88982-172-0 • 5 ½ by 8 ½ • 96 pages

Timothy Brownlow weaves the intricate colours and textures of the Irish landscape with the resonant voices of his youth. “A fine book which recalls John Berger’s remark that language is one place where refuge might be found. Language listens. It gives our dreams and our desires, in Milton’s words, a local habitation.” —Gary Geddes, BC Bookworld

Timothy Brownlow was born in Dublin. He has been publishing poetry since 1960 and is represented in the Penguin Book of Irish Verse (1970, 1981). He now lives in Duncan, B.C. and teaches at Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo.

Sex, Death & Travel / Mona Fertig

$14.95 • 0-88982-169-0 • 5 ½ by 8 ½ • 83 pages

“When it comes to erotic writing, Mona Fertig makes the rules. And she does it by breaking them. Let the reader beware.” —Robert Kroetsch “Voluptuous, luscious, fertile...Fertig’s mastery of the metaphor is breathtaking, her truth-laser voice is searing in its honesty, beautiful and brave.” —Karen X Tulchinsky, The Vancouver Sun