150: Canada’s History in Poetry
Editor: Judy GaudetPublisher: Acorn Press$27.95This new collection of poems tells the story of 150 years as a country, recreating historical events through the vivid, concrete, human element of our poets’ responses to them. Judy Gaudet has collected poems that tell our story in a unique way: through the personal passions and concerns of artists who offer a range of encounters and attitudes. The poets represent a wide variety of Canadian experience: Indigenous, immigrant, and people from every part of the country and period of our history providing a solid representation of Canadian diversity. Poems come from many significant Canadian poets, as well as some lesser known and emerging poets and folk writers.
This journey through the works of our greatest poets and thier reflections on their experiences of the events that have shaped Canada, and continue to shape Canada, provide an exciting and lasting addition to our sense of who we are and where we’ve been, and gives us a basis on which to think about our attitudes and directions for the future.
150: Canada’s History in Poems provides Canadians with an alternative history to the one they read about in textbooks. Looking at our history through the eyes of our artists is not only enlightening, but can give insight into the powerful truths of our past.
Afternoon Horses
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Deirdre Kessler teaches creative writing and children’s literature at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her poetry has appeared in a number of collections, including The New Poets of Prince Edward Island and Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land, and in chapbook form: Subtracting by Seventeen. She is the author of five children’s novels, including the Canadian Children’s Book Centre Award-winning Brupp Rides Again, and six picture books, including perennial favourites Lobster in My Pocket, and Lena and the Whale.
At First, Lonely
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Best-known as a musician and a spoken-word performer, poet Tanya Davis has now taken to the page with At First, Lonely. In this collection, she reflects on life’s many passages: falling in love and out, the search for personal truth, the search for home. Davis’s style is one-of-a-kind: a blend of contemporary phrasing with profound personal expression. But her message is universal; over two million people have watched How to Be Alone, a film adaptation of her poem created by independent filmmaker Andrea Dorfman. Tanya Davis’ poetry challenges the intellect and touches deep places in the heart.
Beautiful Veins
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95A Canadian poet’s last wordsA sense of ego-urgency has seemingly sucked hard on any high octane left in my system, and what used to take me a decade and more to accomplish as a writer has suddenly fruited within a 12-month time frame.- Joe Sherman, December 2005The result is Beautiful Veins, Joe Sherman’s final book of poems. Joseph Sherman, author of seven books of poetry, editor, and supporter of the arts, died on January 9, 2006, in Charlottetown. He was 60.Beautiful Veins begins with the picture of a child, of “one life with all the promise of its beautiful veins.” Some of the poems catch details of domestic life and its indwelling spirit and glancing irony; they explore the cache of memory. Others evoke history and landscape, opening them up to careful consideration. Always there is a love of language and its quirks, oddities, split-levels, riches. Out of the intricate and elliptical syntax, moments of joy are discovered, named against the threat of time and illness.
Beyond Silence
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Beyond Silence: Voices of Child Sexual Abuse is a collection of stories, poems, and images by twelve Island women. In these deeply personal accounts, the women tell about the abuse they suffered as children, the profound effect it has had on their lives, and the reasons why people need to join the fight to stop it. A prevention chapter, written by the group as a whole, focuses on five key areas that need to be addressed in order to end child sexual abuse. These include abusers taking responsibility for their actions and parents taking action to protect their children.Beyond Silence takes a fresh approach to the ongoing work of child sexual abuse prevention by focusing on the knowledge and wisdom of adult survivors. This book has the potential to dramatically change the ways communities respond to child sexual abuse. The stories are raw and real, honest and terrifying. The women dig into the darkness of the past so that others may see the light. They refuse to be silenced and they’re determined to make a difference.
Blue Waiting
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Blue Waiting is a collection of poems in conversation with small beauties formed through the geography of living. This geography takes shape in the edges of islands, mountains, families, and most of all the terrain of the inner life. The inner life is imbued with the details of ordinary life, where the contours of presence is unraveled in attention to what is in before us as humans.
This collection is one of two poets, whose work intersects not only thematically, but particularly in how Wiebe and Snowber continue to find the holy in the ordinary, and wonder in the sensate world. One poem has fed the other, and as each was written separately we invite you to see them as a place for dialogue. Dialoguing with self, other, and the soil beneath the words, which gives breath and life to language itself.
As both poets and educators Snowber and Wiebe find the immersion in present life as the catalyst for the deepest lessons, and the writing of poetry becomes a place of unfolding to what it means to be human and sustain nourishment on the planet. We invite you as a reader to travel along your own wondrous journey and be in dialogue with us.
Dip & Veer Reflections on the Art of Alex Colville
Publisher: Acorn Press$14.95Frank Ledwell has previously published one volume of prose and poetry, The North Shore of Home (Acorn Press, 2002) and two collections of poetry, Crowbush and Other Poems (Ragweed, 1990) and Dip & Veer: Reflections on the Art of Alex Colville (Acorn Press, 1996). He has performed as a popular storyteller in venues across Prince Edward Island. Frank Ledwell is a Professor Emeritus of the English Department of the University of Prince Edward Island, where he taught creative writing for many years. He was the first recipient of the PEI Council of the Arts’ Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literary Arts, and for many years was known as the Island’s unofficial poet laureate.
Enchanted House
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Charlottetown poet Beth E. Janzen’s work has appeared in journals such as The Malahat Review and Grain. Her chapbook Night Vanishes was published by Saturday Morning Chapbooks in 2004. The Enchanted House is her first full collection of poems.
Fireflies in the Magnolia Grove
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95In this, John Smith’s sixth book of poetry, Prince Edward Island’s inaugural Poet Laureate offers up a dialogue about “being,” in the intellectual context of modern times. He explores stages of being, as an individual, as one in relationship to others, and as a part of the earth and of the universe. The poet’s acquaintance with physics, algebra, and geometry collides with his own philosophical questionings, using language to bridge the ephemeral and the infinite. The poems are the distilled, heady musings of a writer whose poetic voice spans millennia.
Her Teeth are Stones
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Each of Judy Gaudet’s poems is a path to somewhere resonant, redolent of memories and anticipations both bittersweet and beautiful. She traces the paths the mind and body takes purposefully, as well as those it happens onto, by chance or consequence. The poems light on home and history, travel afar, return again. They are marked by the toughness of wholly looking and experiencing and are leavened by wry humour and true gratitude for the beauty and magic that touch the earth’s days — and our human ones, tripping over the stones of her path. Her Teeth Are Stones is Judy Gaudet’s first full-length poetry book, following her chapbook Poems, you say.
Here and There
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Inspired by the places, people and sounds around his home town of Morell, Prince Edward Island, Roderick MacDonald pens lycrical poetry that nourishes his reflective nature. Especially inspired by the shore line, MacDonald evokes feelings and memories of Island days spent whiling away at the beach, breathing in the salty air and listening to the sound of the waves. He also writes evocatively about many aspects of the Island way of life throughout the seasons, from a rainy, spring day to a the experience of sharing pint of beer with a friend. The poetry of MacDonald’s collection Here and There will resonate with both Islanders and people who love P.E.I. It is the perfect companion to any bedside.
Here for the Music
$17.95Laurie Brinklow’s long-awaited first collection of poems beaches the reader on the shores of contemporary womanhood. Strewn with memories of the tumultuous journey through childhood to adulthood and the detritus of relationships chanced and abandoned, finally being “here” brings to devotion to daughters and friends and an Island place. Brinklow’s book contains the tidal pull of loss and renewal, departure and arrival that keeps a lover of islands so close to the edges of life and death. That’s the here. But what she is “here” for is both more magical and more pragmatic: the music. It’s the music of language and the dance of human relationships, the sex and love melodies that bewilder and beguile. Brinklow brings this music down to us where we live, with the earthy touch of the “angel-in-charge-of-things-as-they-really-are.”
Here for the Music
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Laurie Brinklow’s long-awaited first collection of poems beaches the reader on the shores of contemporary womanhood. Strewn with memories of the tumultuous journey through childhood to adulthood and the detritus of relationships chanced and abandoned, finally being “here” brings to devotion to daughters and friends and an Island place. Brinklow’s book contains the tidal pull of loss and renewal, departure and arrival that keeps a lover of islands so close to the edges of life and death. That’s the here. But what she is “here” for is both more magical and more pragmatic: the music. It’s the music of language and the dance of human relationships, the sex and love melodies that bewilder and beguile. Brinklow brings this music down to us where we live, with the earthy touch of the “angel-in-charge-of-things-as-they-really-are.”
How Boys Grow Up
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Sean Wiebe is an assistant professor of education at the University of Prince Edward Island. His recent research explores how poets have influenced teaching practice and are insightful theorists in understanding life’s complexities. He has edited two collections of poetry, The Last Red Smartie (1996) and A Nocturnal Reverie (1994), and has had his poetry published in several literary journals, including Standards: International Cultural Studies Journal, Cha: As Asian Literary Journal, Blue Skies Poetry, and Ascent Aspirations Magazine. He and his family live in Charlottetown.
Jeopardy
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Richard Lemm’s new poetry collection, Jeopardy, opens with visits to Tasmania and Egypt. He takes readers to the infamous penal colony on the Tasman Peninsula, then imagines an alternate history in which convicts were sent to Prince Edward Island. Lemm explores his pre- and post-Revolution experiences teaching Egyptian students and encountering a great civilization wrestling with cross-currents of modernity and tradition. His poetic gaze then turns to the struggle of a couple living the ordeal of severe anorexia and the quest for healing.
In “The Sacred and the Profane” poems, he conjures myths and journeys —ancient and modern—to illuminate how we choose to live in the present: a Jewish surgeon’s pilgrimage to Assisi; Adam and Eve’s reflections on their fateful Edenic choice; the poet’s grandfather trading farm clothes for an army uniform and war in the Philippines; a resurrected L. M. Montgomery in a gift shop, surrounded by Anne of Green Gables merchandise. In the final section, Lemm evokes, with wit and urgency, our ecological reality and environmental crises: “The future is forever / now, is headlines scrolling / at glacial melt and animated pixel / speed into amnesia. While the Darwins / of tomorrow and their painstaking facts / watch from the crow’s nests, swaying above / our faith in charts, invincible hulls.”
Other poets have written of Lemm’s “passionate engagement with human nature, including his own,” of how he “masterfully blends his narrative poetic style with lyrical sweeps across time and space,” and of his “wit, his spilling love of life and his poetic magnetism.”
Landmarks: An Anthology
Editor: Brent MacLainePublisher: Acorn Press$16.95Poetry by 50 of the Atlantic region’s finest poets
Last Tomato
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Jane Ledwell grew up in Prince Edward Island. She won first prize for both prose and poetry in the Atlantic Writing Awards in 2001, and has been published in journals such as blueSHIFT and anthologies such as Landmarks and A Bountiful Harvest. She lives and writes in Charlottetown.
Long Reach Home
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Reaching back through a family full of stories and characters, from Newfoundland on her mother’s side to New Brunswick on her father’s, the poems in Long Reach Home are characteristically personal, warm, and accessible- by turns humorous, by turns enraged- but always engaged with the world, distilling simple pleasures and fundamental human struggles from everyday experience.
Prometheus Reconsiders Fire
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95In his new collection of poems, Prometheus Reconsiders Fire, PEI poet Brent MacLaine undertakes an exploration of fire. The prefatory title poem establishes Prometheus as the poet’s persona, a voice that is dedicated to the reconsideration of fire in both its benevolent and malevolent aspects. Formal and elegant, Prometheus plots a trajectory between the classical and the local, a bearing that will be familiar to readers of MacLaine’s earlier work Athena Becomes a Swallow. Wide-ranging in its geography, the new book is wrapped ’round by “The Fire Hall Suite” that begins and ends the book. These are poems that respond to the “drive-by wisdom” created by the anonymous “Sign Person” who speaks to the local community by way of the Fire Hall’s roadside sign. Framed by the “Suite,” the poems of Prometheus move between city and country. A naturalist in the city, MacLaine brings to the urban environment the acutely observing eye that has always characterized his Island nature poems. MacLaine’s imagery, both urban and rural, is remarkable, and no other Canadian poet is quite as capable as MacLaine is in marrying the formal and the colloquial.
