Poems: Collected, Unpublished and New

Literature & Fiction

Watson, Wilfred

Poetry

Gaspereau Pr

For the past several years, Jan Zwicky has been developing a definition and working examples of the word “lyric.” Her writing has taken the shape of poetry and philosophy, neither necessarily confined to the traditions of those genres. Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences is the latest in this ongoing focus, previously explored in collections like Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1998) and in her philosophic works, including Lyric Philosophy (1992) and Wisdom & Metaphor (Gaspereau Press, 2003).   The songs in this collection are odes, addresses and apostrophes, to household fixtures, human emotions, shades of light, seasons, stretches of land, departures, sounds and solitude. Working with the most associative details, Zwicky has whittled encounters with her subjects down to their integral and resounding notes. A single light shining from a house in the winter is the bathtub’s call to its tired owner. Dew on the grass is the long note of calm in a hurried departure. Every presence contains absence, every pause embodies continuation, every house has “one chink open to the wind.” These are songs to the negative space around solid shapes. Wild grape, nuthatch and August are in part defined by the time around their existence. Bath, laundry and grate have a life both for and beyond their owner, and it is upon these tensions that the poet’s fondness develops.   Zwicky’s musical sensibilities give these poems their resolve. The precise lilt of her verse amounts to a resonating frequency for each of her subjects, with the O of each address sounding the driving note. In music Zwicky has captured the energy and suddenness of realizations like homecoming, departure, familiarity and alienation. Her songs walk the tightrope between thinking and being, steadying and strengthening the act of imagination that maintains contact between past, present and future.   The seven studies in this collection signal a slower tempo, a downshift into the clipped stillness of memory. Summer months, garden gate, childhood house and silent afternoons are summoned to the surface for a look. These give way to six silences: three-line moments of pause or hush that request careful entrance and exit. Like still lifes or haikus, these silences suspend time within time. Basil springs motionless, grass ripens, pollen settles. As with the absences contained in her songs, Zwicky’s silences embody the tenuous balance between thought and experience.   Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences is a vital addition to a remarkable body of work. Zwicky’s lyricism proves to the senses what lies within the parameters set by her prose.   The trade edition of this book is a 5 x 8-inch, smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text is printed offset on laid paper.

Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences

Zwicky, Jan

Gravity’s Plumb Line is Ross Leckie’s third collection of poetry. It begins on the Saint John River, then moves out into neighbouring fields, woods and landscapes beyond. These poems bring the lushness of natural abundance in contact with the process of comprehending its intricacies. The collection’s opening series leaves from Little St. John Lake, travelling through Edmundston and Grand Falls, down through the heart of New Brunswick, into the Mactaquac Dam, through the city of Fredericton and out into the Atlantic at Saint John Harbour. With inventive language, interest and affection, Leckie marvels at the river’s shifting attitude through towns and cities, bridges, surrounding vegetation, cultural flavours, and the memories that surround his experience. In Grand Falls the poet imagines the town’s dreamlife, while in Hartland he recalls an afternoon spent on the covered bridge in the company of his father, and in Mactaquac he considers the process of writing in the presence of the dam that churns river into electricity. From the river Leckie moves outward, delighting in avian intellect, the shapes of trees, the density of ground. To each he brings sharp perceptions and an intriguing level of engagement with the process of conveying these perceptions. Readers are privy to missteps and moments of satisfaction as the poet hones his senses ever closer. In the forest Leckie draws out the elusive ice bird, as well as pine trees, sunlight, winter afternoons, iris and lady’s slipper, among others. Indoors, his eye trains on imported oranges and the journey of water from source to thirst. The title segment broadens into a distinctly musical cadence that hinges on wit, stimulating vocabulary, the occasional blues influence and solid rhythms. In “That Dirt Road,” Leckie replays the lilting repetition of childhood reluctance along a country road, while “Woke up This Morning” and “Bending the Blue Notes” draw from a more formal appreciation of the blues genre. In the final group of poems, Leckie re-envisions tenets of classical theatremimesis, hamartia, unity, character, spectacle, catharsis and six others. These concepts are transported out of doors and tested against woods, sky, garden, field, wind and pond. Seasons in the woods mimic the trials of human experience, and stars enact the downfall of a hero reaching beyond his means. In 12 brief poems Leckie locates the mainstays of human drama in the tumult of our environsa resounding conclusion in the poet’s stirring translations of life into art. “I think my poems capture the nimble movement of the perceptual act,” says Leckie, “but they are also meditations that transform the visible world into passionate thought. ‘Seeing is believing’. I work with lush metaphors to provoke associations that reverberate through what we know of self and other, of culture and politics. We can only know life by the way we walk through it, by the rhythms of our feet.” This 5 x 8-inch book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text is printed offset on laid paper.

Gravity's Plumb Line

Leckie, Ross

In this remarkable follow-up to Spar: Words in Place (Gaspereau Press, 2002), Peter Sanger explores the scope of words in time. Offering significant new material to the study of linguist Silas Rand and poet John Thompson, Sanger introduces Susan Barss and Florence Ayscough, notable but largely unsung contributors to Rand’s and Thompson’s work. With the same passion for reading and exploration, along with several of the neighbourhood landmarks, symbolic imagery and literary influences that first emerged in Spar, Sanger joins the lives and work of key authors and translators in Canada’s literary history. Sanger’s unique and far-sighted approach to words and time illuminates critical intersections between authors, readers and texts. “White Salt Mountain is a mystery,” says Sanger. “The consistent theme of the book is the source and meaning, at the most profound levels, of its title. This book fits into the literary category also occupied by Poe’s ‘Gold Bug’ story and more recently by A. S. Byatt’s Possession about the detection of the real life of a Victorian poetess and the parallel life lived by the modern detective literary scholars. . . . The reader of White Salt Mountain participates not only in the detection of a phrase but also in discovering Florence Ayscough and Susan Barss, discovering certain feminine continuities in Canadian cultural history which had been lost. . . . At base, White Salt Mountain is structured according to the most ancient of narrative formsthe quest for hidden and lost treasure. Its Shangri-la is St. Andrew’sits Treasure Island rests in the Bay of Fundy” On a journey to MacMaster Island in Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick, Sanger introduces the work of nineteenth-century translator and poet Florence Ayscough. He provides the first comprehensive account of Ayscough’s life, including her years in Shanghai, her study of Chinese, her collaboration with American poet Amy Lowell on translations of Chinese poetry, and the influence of these translations and others on the Canadian poetic idiom that persists today. Sanger’s work illustrates the power words carry across time beyond their volumes. In his discussion of New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack, a collection that continues as one of the most widely influential works in Canadian poetry, Sanger works from inside and outside of Thompson’s words, bringing to life the poet’s guiding mythology and influences, and testing them in transit and in conversation with other texts. Sanger’s final chapter begins in a canoe on the Shubenacadie River as he sets out to locate ‘Grandmother’s Place’, described in Silas Rand’s Legends of the Micmacs. Sanger also presents his recent discovery of Rand’s original transcripts of two stories told by Susan Barss in 1847, among the earliest surviving records of Native storytelling in North America. Sanger’s sleuthing, and the kinds of parallels and intersections it brings to light, embodies a departure from the conventions of literary criticism into a style of reading that is grounded in locale and attuned to the way a literary culture takes shape over time. Peter Sanger has published five collections of poetry, including Earth Moth (1991) and Ironworks (2001), a collaborative project with photographer Thaddeus Holownia. His most recent work is Spar: Words in Place (2002), a collection of essays based on life in rural Nova Scotia. Sanger has been the poetry editor of The Antigonish Review since 1985. He lives on a farm in South Maitland, Nova Scotia. The trade edition of this book is a 5 x 8-inch, smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text is printed offset on laid paper.

White Salt Mountain: Words In Time

Sanger, Peter

History & Criticism

One afternoon in the autumn of 2003 a manuscript arrived from Pereaux, Nova Scotia. The covering letter was jotted in pencil on the back of some correspondence to do with harvesting HoneyCrisp apples. Our interest was piqued. Probing Minds, Salamander Girls and a Dog Named Sally is a meandering memoir of growing up along the back roads, orchards and hillsides of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. Harrison Wright’s hardy sense of humour, love of adventure and confident voice usher us into a world characterized by fascination and delight with life. Wright regales with stories about friends, farming, beat-up cars, rousing get-togethers, pets and wildlife, unattainable college girls and home-brewed adventures. Coupled with these are his reflections on life and the particulars of growing up. Like a roughly hewn Garrison Keillor, Wright records his daily passings through his landscape. Set “on a small winding dirt road with a No Exit sign at the end of it,” these narratives are told thoughtfully, with ease and humour, and a solid sense of self and place. Wright demonstrates a similar approach to life and writing: testing the limits, then going beyond them. Probing Minds is a treatise on living well and a coming-of-age memoir set against the well-worn landscape of Nova Scotia’s agricultural region. The collection is comprised of sixteen narratives, many of which you can bet have been told once or twice on a back porch on a hot afternoon or next to the wood stove on a cold January evening. At twenty-six, Wright has learned a thing or two, but has not lost touch with the best of his earlier exploits. He relives a day spent building an aerial shortcut across a deep gully, the joy of digging a hole for the sake of a hole, and the kinds of adventures that emerge naturally on a farm: spring burning, engine fires and near misses with tractors. Alongside are sobering encounters with nesting pheasants and leopard frogs, and silent afternoons spent tilling fields; experiences that centre him in the natural world. Probing Minds, Salamander Girls and a Dog Named Sally is the product of an unwieldy imagination, thoughtful outlook and Wright’s refreshing willingness to have a laugh at his own expense. “A lot of these stories were actually inspired somewhat by depression, or as a counter to depression,” says Wright. “It’s a common theme in the world today; I don’t know if the world’s a more depressing place, humankind is more self-inspecting, or if in the information age we feel we just know too much. I’ve seen it in my life, in others, sometimes in myself. But sometimes things happen, things I feel sort of excited about, or I’ll get this surge of something in my brain that makes me glad to be doing what I’m doing, or maybe there’s some mystery about that I want to be a part of. Most of the stories are me trying to capture those things that make life livable and enjoyable, things that when they happen you know you will remember them. These stories are a giant list in my pocket.” This 5.25 x 8-inch book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with an offset-printed jacket. The text is printed offset on laid paper.

Probing Minds, Salamander Girls & A Dog Named Sally: A Hubbard Mountain Memoir

Science & Math

Wright, Harrison

Nature & Ecology

A Ship Portrait is a tribute to the life and art of John O’Brien, nineteenth-century painter of ships, written as what Harry Thurston calls “a novella in verse.” Built upon two voices, O’Brien’s and the poet’s, the poem traces the painter’s life in Halifax during the apex and decline of the Golden Age of Sail. Thurston characterizes this era in Nova Scotia’s history as a time of shifting mythologies, of strife between Old World and New, and of a surprisingly cosmopolitan lifestyle sustained by the shipping industry. “For some time,” says Thurston, “I had wanted to write a long poem about our historical relationship to the sea. Then, in 1984, I attended an exhibition of John O’Brien’s work at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotiaship portraits of a kind I had grown up seeing in the libraries, museums and parlours of Yarmouth. This artist’s vision, rather than the more romantically conventional viewpoint of the ‘iron men’ of wooden ship fame, seemed a promising lens. It took another two decades for me to begin writing what at first I imagined as a kind of nineteenth-century-style narrative poem. I needed a form that could reach beyond the traditional bounds of lyrical poetry, to address such matters as the economy and the place of the artist in societythe more proper concerns of a novel. I had always liked dramatic monologue, so began in O’Brien’s voice. Oddly, I found the lines unrolling in perfectly good blank verse. However, not long into the writing process, I began a dialogue with O’Brien, an exchange of our histories as Maritimers and of the working lives of artists, which bridge time and place.” We meet O’Brien on his deathbed from where he recounts his life as it began in 1831 aboard a ship bound for Canada. Alternating with O’Brien’s, Thurston’s own voice offers commentary, support and retrospection, reaching a long arm over the years to his own childhood stomping grounds in Yarmouth and the more subdued climate in Nova Scotia’s ports a century after the Golden Age. Thurston considers O’Brien’s contemporariesMelville, Ruskin and Turneras counterpoints to the painter’s career and as part of a wider examination of the role of artists and art in the composition of history. Perhaps the most fascinating passages in the poem are those in which O’Brien’s artistic techniques and preferences are revealed. Thurston draws out this tension at the centre of O’Brien’s portraits, commenting on the extent to which the painter’s career hung in the balance alongside the Age of Sail. The poem’s two halves embody the crossovers between art and history, and how each shapes our perception of the other. Thurston’s vivid scenes hinge on associative details, creating a narrative that is exotic, grounded and subtly informative. In employing both contemporary and historic voices, he successfully condenses this real-life artist’s story into art, genuinely engaging in a thrilling period of Nova Scotia’s history. This book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with an offset-printed jacket. The text was printed offset on laid paper.

A Ship Portrait

Thurston, Harry

This book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with an offset-printed jacket. The text was printed offset on laid paper.

Ship Portrait

Engineering & Transportation

Transportation

Deactivated West 100 is Don McKay’s latest set of variations on a poetics of place. Armed with lunch and relevant reading material, McKay invites us to join him on Vancouver Island for a series of explorations that depend on first losing our way. In the spirit of Vis à Vis (Gaspereau Press, 2001), McKay embarks on a project to locate a human understanding of place in the midst of wilderness and in the scheme of infinite time. In six movements of prose and poetry, questions are clarified and answers begun. Home is a series of habits, McKay suggests, as he recounts a personal tradition that involves selecting a stone from a local beach, familiarizing himself with it over the years, and then returning it from his pocket to the same beach and selecting a new one. Picking up the discussion of place and wilderness that began in Vis à Vis, McKay launches it in a new direction, headlong into the geologic/geopoetic time scale where crystals, magma, terranes and Xenophanes affirm an understanding of how we inhabit space and time. At the centre of the collection is a series of poems dedicated to the Shay locomotive, which powered Vancouver Island’s logging industry in the 1920s. Here the natural and the built coexist, mental and geographical locations intersect, and wilderness and creativity border. These poems are followed by a set of journeys made for the purpose of losing the way and a treatise on natural clearings. On the ground, McKay is both precise and imaginative, pursuing the specific interstices where abstractions leak into the forest, and walks follow creeks into wilder, less habitable areas of thought. “The background for Deactivated West 100 is a particular fault line on southern Vancouver Island known as the Loss Creek-Leech River fault,” says McKay. “It is very eloquent because it is marked on the surface by a deep canyonat least at its western end, in which Loss Creek, the Leech River and a couple of reservoirs lie. I decided, as part of my apprenticeship to west coast landscapes, to walk the fault line from end to end and take note of whatever it presented to me in terms of rocks, plants, animals, birds (of course) and human history. A lot of that walking was done on the old deactivated bush road which follows Loss Creek and gives the book its title. Since the area has been very aggressively logged, this also led me into the history and politics of forestry hereaboutsincluding technological advances like the Shay locomotive and the Stihl chainsaw, both of whom make appearances in the book.” Deactivated West 100 proceeds with the same mix of humour, humility and determined authenticity that have characterized McKay’s previous works. At a pace that falls somewhere between stroll and clamber, McKay introduces a potent set of ideas with which to situate ourselves in the woods. This book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Electra and printed offset on laid paper.

Deactivated West 100

McKay, Don

“I would not have wanted not to know you exactly as you were. I would not like to lose even a moment of your slow decline.” From acclaimed author John Terpstra comes the story of his wife’s family and the short lives of her three brothers, each of whom lived with muscular dystrophy until their early twenties. With humour, reverence and great love, Terpstra charts the experience of a family under unusual, but resoundingly human, circumstances. He recreates the daily life, the vitality and wit shared by the three boys, and his relationships with them as they entered the final stages of their illness. Above all, he underlines the privilege of spending time with each of themNeil, Paul and Ericcoming to know their persistence as individuals, their collective brand of humour and the force field of their personalities in unison. Terpstra recounts the habits, the gentle rituals and oddities of living in the boys’ realm: their shared passion for sports, their penchant for nicknames, their records and correspondence, and the steady flow of friends, family and caregivers who participated in their lives. Many times along the way, convictions are checked, challenged and rechecked, faith upended and restored, and perceptions of illness, disability and quality of life vigorously shaken. The Boys honours the last year in the lives of three brothers whose days could never rightly be called wasted or tragic, but whose time on earth was all too brief. Terpstra celebrates life and challenges the brackets we place around lives characterized by illness. He centres the mechanics of the boys’ physical presence within the geography of their home and community. The Boys is also a gradual examination of storytelling, of the ownership of stories, of where stories effectively begin and whether they ever end. “I have made a heap of all that I could find. . .” says Terpstra, “the stuff kept in trunks and boxes; loose photos and albums, a diary, keepsakes, the written notes. What remained, materially, of their lives. Can art be made from terminal disease? After all these years the narrative of their lives had distilled into key moments and events, I would like to say, but it was really in the putting-together and spelling out in words of insignificant and mundane moments and events that their various lights began to shine. I was also thinking about St. Augustine, and the brief, numbered chapters of his Confessions. I thought, at first, that each of the chapters should be addressed directly to God, as they are in that book, because then the big why of the family’s story could stay front and centre the whole time. It seemed appropriate. Except that the big why never dominated the story as it originally unfolded, and was not doing so as the story unfolded before me. Scrap St. Augustine. With their lives these brothers who had no future raised life high; in their daily routines, routine itself became holy. Can art be made from terminal disease? I took my cue from them.” This book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Fred Smeijer’s Quadraat and Quadraat Sans, and printed offset on laid paper.
Finalist for the 2006 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction and finalist for British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

The Boys: Or, Waiting for the Electrician's Daughter

Medical Books

Terpstra, John

Nursing

On 20 March 2004, John Ralston Saul delivered the inaugural Joseph Howe lecture at King’s College School of Journalism in Halifax, Nova Scotia. One of Canada’s foremost thinkers on issues of media, politics and society, Saul spoke to the legacy of Joseph Howe, his famous defense in 1835, and of his contributions to a distinctly Canadian position on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. His speech recalls a time when political debate was prioritized in society and covered by the media, and when the democratic foundations of this country were first articulated and then pursued via social reforms. “We’re curious. And we’re actually not in a rush,” says Saul of our current situation. Why then, with the collective level of education and individual life expectancy steadily on the rise, have we not allocated more time to engaging in public debate of ideas and to covering these debates in the media? Why, when the creation of Canada as a country is still remembered as the result of all-night discussions and passionate engagement, have we not chosen to continue discussion simply as a means of maintaining an active, conscious citizenry? Saul applauds the examples of responsible, courageous investigative journalism in evidence today, and urges a wider move away from the results-focused, low-content buzz that comprises so much of mainstream media both in print and on television, and which stands in direct contradiction with participatory democracy and with freedom of the press. Cutting through murky constructs like intellectual-property rights and access to information, he identifies the journalistic challenge of locating shapes in the mass of information and beneath the misleading hype around secrets. In a style that is highly articulate, humorous and emphatic, John Ralston Saul provides a succinct, relevant look at Canadian history, our current whereabouts, and an ambitious rally for participatory democracy and intelligent media for the future.

Joseph Howe & the Battle for Freedom of Speech

SAUL, John Ralston

Essays & Correspondence

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