Shades of Green
Editor: Brent MacLainePublisher: Acorn Press$16.95Brent MacLaine is Professor of English and a 3M Teaching Fellow at the University of Prince Edward Island where he teaches twentieth-century literature. He was born and grew up in the rural community of Rice Point, PEI, to which he returned after teaching at universities in Vancouver, Edmonton, China, and Singapore. In addition to numerous articles on modern literature and the literature of Atlantic Canada, he has published two volumes of poetry, Wind and Root (Vehicule 2000) and These Fields Were Rivers (Goose Lane 2004). He has also edited with Hugh MacDonald Landmarks: an Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land (Acorn 2001).
Taste of Water
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95The taste of water is something we all know but need to be reminded of once in a while: how it tastes of shared memory, and of what it means to be human, and of the earth.Prince Edward Island’s second Poet Laureate, Frank Ledwell, invites us to enter his words and world, seeking to share a sense of our common humanity and our interdependent fates, and to recognize communal experience in the particularities of personal experience.The traditional role of the Poet Laureate is to mark occasions, and Ledwell’s poems masterfully make quotidian Island events and lives into special occasions that sing with the “spirit of the spoken word taking hold.”
the Whither Poems
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95the whither poems is a poetry collection by Catherine Edward, a septuagenarian grandmother. “Whither is an oldish word, with a helpful attitude. I love it for that,” she says. “The overarching theme of the book is ‘that which cannot be’ while admitting to ‘what must be’. It is in the response to unanticipated, uninvited change that one’s mettle is revealed.”
This is How I Connect to You
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95This collection is challenge, intimacy, and myth, revealed or transmuted in the moments of everyday living
Variations on Blue
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95This year’s poetry book by an Island writer is by former P.E.I. bookseller Pam Martin; this is her first book. As a child Pam Martin had four very sudden and unexpected encounters with death. These experiences shaped her emotional life as she struggled to understand them and to find beauty in a world that seemed fraught with peril. The poems also examine, with delicacy and humour, the world she encountered as a teenager, a social worker and a wife.
What Really Happened is This A Poetry Memoir
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95This collection of moving poetry puts into words the heartbreak and triumphs of looking after ailing parents.What Really Happened is This is a poetry memoir that focuses on the ten-year journey of an adult “only child” as her beloved parents face declining health and death. The wry, poignant, humorous, and sometimes heartbreaking, poems chronicle the poet’s struggle to find balance in her life, as she juggles the needs of her family with her own work and creative life. The poems touch on the universal in specific experiences, as the poet faces the death of each parent, and realizes she is now next in line.
