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In these Light Takes or playful seizures, Anderson speaks elegantly and eloquently of the unspeakable. She talks lightly of heavy things. She pricks our imagination into fresh perceptions of how things stand with us-especially of how we stand in relation to the transcendent. She perches as the proverbial fly on the wall: here is human nature twisting in knots of evasion, bumping into joy by chance, making the worst of a good situation, or the best of a bad. It is not that Anderson is cynical, but that she sees the many ploys people use to dodge the grace that awaits them. More often than not, it is as one of these dodgers that she speaks. But sometimes it is as an oracle indistinguishable from the voice of a child, or from the king’s fool. Occasionally the nonhuman world of tamed or untamed nature confronts the human condition and calls it into question, and Anderson watches it with love and awe. This is a watching book, where watching is distilled into drops. The drops are small enough that you must stop and wonder what it is you just tasted. Was that gall, or medicine, or honey? Or all three?
This book celebrates the life and work of acclaimed New Brunswick photographer Thaddeus Holownia, former head of Fine Arts and Research Professor at Mount Allison University, and recipient of the Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for High Achievement in the Arts. As well as providing a biographical overview, Peter Sanger’s lyrical survey contextualizes Holownia’s extensive body of work, revealing how his photographs “construct, refine, vary, sustain, and share patterns of spatial structure, imagery, and thematic implication in a continuous present which is the true tense of Holownia’s art.”
Like consists of fifty poems every one of which uses the word “like.” Like is about people and things Layton likes — or, sometimes, dislikes. In these poems, Layton expresses a gamut of emotions, from the fear of death to the peaceful contentment of watching two nesting Canadian geese. However, “like” is more than an emotionally charged verb. It is also the basis of simile. It is by likening one thing to another that Layton finds meaning in ordinary things. Since all things are alike in some way, Like is a book of poetry about the underlying unity of all creation.
Like a Child of the Earth, the first volume of Jovette Marchessault’s autobiographical trilogy, won the Prix France-Québec in 1976. In it, the largely self-taught artist and author, who left school at the age of fourteen to work in a factory, reflects upon her “years of wandering before encountering painting and writing.” Though a first novel, this is by no means a conventional account of growing up poor in the Plateau Mont-Royal. Rather it is a unique, lyrical, frequently surreal interior journey which carries the reader in the belly of a great Greyhound from Mexico across all America, past cornfields haunted by Jack Kerouac’s ghost, to Montreal, back through time to Columbus, and forward to futures as yet unrealized. The final section of the book celebrates Jovette’s grandmother, painter of hens and pianist extraordinaire, who becomes the centre of the next volume, Mother of the Grass. Though distinctively québécoise, Marchessault’s voice is profoundly North American as well, and her vision encompasses the tragic and glorious history of the entire continent.
After breaking up the family act in 1916, Keatonesque comedic performer Billy Pascoe retreats to Muskoka to consider his prospects as a solo performer. Instead, Pascoe discovers an unlikely partner and straightman in Lucinda Hart, one half of a disbanded song-and-dance sister act. While still wrestling to mesh their vastly different experiences of rehearsal and performance, Pascoe & Hart hit the vaudeville circuit, perfecting their act, gaining each other’s trust and winning over audiences. Brennan’s portrayal of the intimate, often tenuous interactions underlying the collaborative creative process reminds us of the stage’s kinship with everyday life, where limits must be tested and risks taken in the pursuit of greater dreams.
Ernest C. Manning, premier of Alberta for twenty-five years, died on February 19, 1996, at age 87. Some say, though, that his spirit lives on, not only in the hereafter in which he so strongly believed, but in his son, Preston Manning, the new kid on the federal political block. In Like Father, Like Son, Lloyd Mackey traces the footsteps of these two Canadian political figures, focusing on their similarities and differences.
Both Ernest and Preston Manning were shaped by — and shaped — Alberta’s “Bible belts.” Mackey, aware that one out of every eight Canadians is directly connected with Christian evangelicalism and another six draw some spiritual sustenance from its sway, provides a vivid word picture of the movement. The book begins with the story of how William (Bible Bill) Aberthart found in Ernest Manning the son he never had. Thinking that, under Aberhart’s monitoring, he would become a fundamentalist minister, Manning found himself, at age twenty-five, an Alberta cabinet minister. When Aberhart died eight years later, Manning began twenty-five years as the Alberta premier — and the widely known preacher of the National Bible Hour.
As a lad, Preston Manning gets to meet with and learn from many of his father’s political and religious colleagues. At the University of Alberta, he switches from physics to political economics; and his Christianity grows from an inherited faith to one he can call his own. After University, Preston Manning and his father increasingly influence each other. They work together on a variety of projects in the fields of business, religion, and politics and community development.
Now in his fifties, Preston Manning may be about to succeed at what his father never tried. But there are many a slip between cup and lip, and Like Father, Like Son tries to identify some of them.
To celebrate their anniversary, Sam surprises his wife Vera by bringing her back to the spot of their rural honeymoon fifty years ago. Now surrounded by parking lots and software buildings, Vera is shocked to discover that the once charming bed and breakfast has transformed into the last place on earth she wants to be. When Sam has an unexpected heart attack, Vera is hopelessly stuck. A strange visitor and the arrival of her daughters force her to reevaluate the sum of her life and the relationships she has formed with her family. Like Wolves is a black comedy about marriage, dreams, choices, and finally letting go.
In November 1945, Willard Bishop, a young music enthusiast, and his ham-radio-operator father launched the Annapolis Valley’s first commercial broadcasting service. The makeshift radio studio they created in the back rooms of their Windsor, Nova Scotia, home eventually grew into a unique network of five AM radio stations and an FM service. In this personal memoir, Bishop describes his experiences on and off the airwaves. From early technical innovations and mobile broadcasts to his passion for music and flying, Bishop’s story offers a heartwarming, often humorous look at the man behind the microphone.
In 1912, two young boys in a Catholic college fall in love while working on a play about St. Sebastian. Their passion ends in tragedy with one boy sent to prison, the other dead. Years later, as the aged inmate is about to be released, he is visited by the local monsignor, who as a boy was party to the tragic events. The inmate re-stages the entire story as a play, forcing the monsignor to admit his role in the tragedy.
Taking as her alter-ego Lily Briscoe–the painter in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse–Mary Meigs paints a portrait of herself, her family and her friends in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, a book that is both autobiography and memoir. In it, she describes the three major decisions of her life: “not to marry, to be an artist” and to listen to her “own voices.” She speaks of her parents who belonged to “a generation before their own” and how they instilled in her a sense of guilt, locking her in the prison of her self, a prison constructed “with the material of doubt and failure; of shattered dreams and unhappy loves, jealousy, hate, envy and the deadly sins of lovelessness and indifference,” but she also tells how she escapes from this prison with the knowledge that her inner sun takes its energy “from love, from creativity.”
Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait is a book about the exercise of the will, the art of dreaming and the transcendent power of friendship. It is a very wise book written by a woman who waited–and lived–some sixty years before beginning to write.
Lily Pond, The
Limbinal, as its hybrid title suggests, speaks in the porous space between a limb’s articulations and a liminal border. Formally diverse, the pieces in Limbinal intersect prose fragments with incantatory dialogues, poetic footnotes with photographic phrases, rebellious translations with liquid transpositions.
Against a backdrop of globalization fantasies heralding the new utopia, the fallout of nationalistic impulses, conflicts repeatedly arising out of rigid entrenchment, and the increasingly hazy distinction between public and private, voices struggle to cross, to intersect, to overlap. It is the permeable spaces arising between these voices that matter. Here, linguistic limbs fold and migrate, a distant border politicks and trips over the horizon, a river overflows, floods, palimpsests another river, Arendt’s responsibility touches Deleuze’s fold, the body, changeable, restless, searches for resonances.
New translations of Paul Celan’s Romanian poems become a generative field of language that sprout other limbs and broach other thresholds. A voice intimately addresses the border while multilingual subjectivities tackle radical responses. So the mouth, possibly hungering, possibly melodic, is always present, ready to disarticulate in order to articulate before the city gates, wobbly with struggle.
The lives of women and girls are at the core of Limbo. These stories map the lives and emotional journeys of women at crossroads–women searching for meaning, battling indecision, and sometimes reaching an exhausted acceptance of their circumstance.
Just as for Dante, for whom the image of the beloved gave entrance to a complete imagination of the world, an “imago mundi,” the betrayal of a beloved can also shatter the poet’s vision, no matter how elaborately conceived. Such a betrayal can turn the world upside down, where what was loved is now hated, what was benign becomes threatening, what was dangerous is embraced, what was worshipped is murdered, what was past is future. The author is cast adrift, to wander the earth from Tahiti to Prague, from Morocco to Miami, “in limbo” in a newly unknown world.
Part divorce journal, part travel poem, part meditation on the rudderless denizens of the global village of which the author is merely one, Limbo Road chronicles the search for the new beloved, the one who will lead to the new “City of God.” That she appears only in glimpses is a credit to Ken Norris’s adept reading of the late twentieth century, and his disciplined mapping of its increasingly unknown territories. A beautifully sustained work of lyricism from a highly accomplished poet.
Part two of the definitive biography of the rock ’n’ roll kings of the North — covering Rush’s most iconic and popular albums, Moving Pictures and Power Windows
Includes two full-color photo inserts, with 16 pages of the band on tour and in the studio
In the follow-up to Anthem: Rush in the ’70s, Martin Popoff brings together canon analysis, cultural context, and extensive firsthand interviews to celebrate Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart at the peak of their persuasive power. Rush was one of the most celebrated hard rock acts of the ’80s, and the second book of Popoff’s staggeringly comprehensive three-part series takes readers from Permanent Waves to Presto, while bringing new insight to Moving Pictures, their crowning glory. Limelight: Rush in the ’80s is a celebration of fame, of the pushback against that fame, of fortunes made — and spent …
In the latter half of the decade, as Rush adopts keyboard technology and gets pert and poppy, there’s an uproar amongst diehards, but the band finds a whole new crop of listeners. Limelight charts a dizzying period in the band’s career, built of explosive excitement but also exhaustion, a state that would lead, as the ’90s dawned, to the band questioning everything they previously believed, and each member eying the oncoming decade with trepidation and suspicion.