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In his first book since the novel Napoleon’s Retreat, and his first collection of poems in almost a decade, Robert Allen continues to dazzle with his astonishingly diverse work. Among other things, Ricky Ricardo Suites contains 46 new sections of the long poem The Encantadas, which Phil Hall called “…a wondrous poem: dense, lush, hypnotic.”
The poems in Ride the Blue Roan demonstrate the same simplicity and craft as a hand-made instrument. Without affectation, but with open intensity, Weier crafts poems of life fully lived.
In May 1949, at the age of twenty, Barbara Kingscote left her farm in Mascouche, Quebec, and set out for the Pacific Ocean on horseback. Barbara and her equine companion Zazy reached the West Coast just over a year later, after travelling 4ꯠ miles and discovering the heart of this great country. Ride the Rising Wind reveals Canada through the fresh eyes of a brave young woman discovering both herself and her country on the journey of a lifetime.
On the ghastly battlefields of the First World War, Jimmie Johnston drove teams or pack horses carrying ammunition and hauling guns to the front lines. One night, Johnston was hauling guns back from the front line. Suddenly, in the darkness and pouring rain, he, his team, the wagon, and the guns pitched into an old trench. After disentangling the horses from their harness, Johnston found a trenching tool, dug away the side of the trench, and led the horses out of what had become a sea of mud. Then he harnessed them again, took them back to camp, cleaned them up, and returned to the trench to find the wagon blown to bits by German fire.
Jimmie Johnston, the farm boy, endured nearly three years under constant artillery fire. Two decades after the war ended, he wrote this memoir of his wartime experiences on a trip back to Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. In Riding into War, Johnston marvels at how jokes and pranks and the funny side of even the most terrible events have stuck in his mind. Yet, even in the face of horror and suffering, his sense of humour rarely deserted him. The scenes he relates destroyed many men’s sanity, but Johnston’s ability to laugh and the practical need to care for his horses no doubt contributed to his recovery. After the war, he says, “my nerves were not too good, and I remember a lot of nights I would get up when no one else was around and have to go for a long walk.” But, he concludes, “After some time, this seemed to wear off and soon back to a new life again.”
Riding Into War is volume 4 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
Hamilton Mack Laing was an illustrious early British Columbia writer and naturalist. But few know him as how he described himself in his mid-thirties: a motorcycle-naturalist. For several years beginning in 1914, Laing used the motorcycle to access the natural world, believing it gave him a distinct advantage over other forms of transportation. During this period in his life he would take on a transcontinental journey, riding across the United States from Brooklyn to Oakland in 1915. His previously unpublished manuscript of this journey has been hidden away for nearly a century. Now, its pages telling the tale of his “six-weeks’ perambulation” will be available to readers for the first time. Riding the Continent tells the story of a pioneering motorcyclist and independently thinking naturalist as well as an unusual road trip. As Laing put it, “the lure of the unending road is a call that will not be denied.” Laing’s tale explores the beauty of North America’s bird life, describes the sights, scenery and people he encountered, and takes us along for the ride on a 1915 Harley-Davidson he named Barking Betsy. Also included are a foreword by Laing biographer and B.C. historian Richard Mackie and an afterword by editor and motorcycle travel writer Trevor Marc Hughes.
Rifke (Rosalie Wise Sharp) grew up in North Toronto, which felt to her like a foreign place because there were no other Jewish families there in the late 1930s. Yiddish was spoken in her household, and the food, dress, and customs of Ozarow — the Polish shtetl (small Jewish town) from which her parents emigrated — were all maintained.
Rifke’s peers took lessons in tap-dancing, ice-skating, the piano, and the flute; activities that didn’t translate into the Yiddish vocabulary at the Wises, where only hard work, no nonsense, and book-learning were permitted. Rifke secretly decided to pass as a Gentile, joining a bible class and the Christmas choir. She did not bring home friends, in case they were witness to a Jewish ritual like the koshering of meat. Rifke was guilty about her pursuit of Gentile activities during the war time, when her mother was frantic with fear that their family in Poland was being slaughtered by the Nazis.
In high school, Rifke’s life changed when being “a freak” translated to being “eccentric” and “respectable.” It was there that she met and married her soul mate Isadore, who worked in the construction business, much to her parents’ disappointment. Prosperity, took time; however, Isadore’s audacious dream to build a world class hotel chain, The Four Seasons, came to pass. In this memoir, Rosalie Sharp casts a wry and self-deprecating look back on her childhood, with anecdotes about the chance events and comic ironies that make up a life.
In the early hours of February 15, 1982, tragedy struck the Ocean Ranger oil rig when it capsized and sank in a severe weather storm 170 nautical miles east of St. John’s, Newfoundland. All of the eighty-four crewmen perished, including fifty-six men from the province. This was Canada’s greatest maritime disaster since World War II. Rig is a powerful story filled with first-person accounts and previously unpublished photographs. In an intimate journey through grief and sadness, Rig searches for reconciliation among the victims’ families and those who risked their own lives to help those on the Ocean Ranger.
Moishe Yukle Bernstein was a poor pedlar who bought land near Pontypool, Ontario, a tiny Protestant town outside Toronto. The spot became a summer getaway for Jewish garment workers from Kensington Market — and for six decades, families made their way to the small village, where they shared dreams, memories, and a pathetic waterfront. With a vast array of characters, songs, and a healthy dose of humour, The Right Road to Pontypool is a unique and moving depiction of the Jewish experience in Canada.
From the Aurora Award-winning author of Marseguro (DAW Books) comes a fast-paced space opera about first contact – with a difference.
When Art Stoddard, the civilian information officer for the generation starship Mayflower II, is kidnapped by a secret military organization determined to overthrow the Captain and Crew, he becomes embroiled in a conflict that tests everything he believed to be true, forced to choose between preserving social order and restoring the people’s right to know.
His problems escalate when he’s ripped from the safety of his ship by the mysterious residents of the unknown planet that is the ship’s destination and becomes a pawn in a game that will determine the fate of ship and planet alike. As he and his newfound friends rush to save both, he faces questions of courage, loyalty, and moral responsibility.
The late poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the summits of European poetry in the twentieth century. Completed in 1922, as were T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, Duino Elegies ranks with them as a classic of literary Modernism and as an inquiry into the spiritual crisis of modernity. The ten long poems grapple with the issue of how the human condition and the role of art have altered in the modern era, with the decline of religion and the acceleration of technology.
1922 also saw the unexpected birth and completion of a new work, The Sonnets to Orpheus, a cycle of 55 sonnets giving lyrical expression to the philosophical insights gained in the Elegies. This is dedicated to Orpheus, the mythic singer and lyre player, who becomes a symbol for Rilke of the acceptance of transience in life and transformation in art. The third part of the late poetry consists of the less known brief lyrics Rilke wrote in the five years prior to his death in December 1926. These last poems constitute a kind of third testament, along with the Elegies and Sonnets.
Graham Good’s edition is the first to combine translations of all three into a single volume. His versions represent the meanings and echo the sound patterns of the original within fluid and readable English verse, while the introduction and detailed commentary elucidate the contexts, themes and allusions to help make Rilke’s late poetry accessible to contemporary poetry lovers and spiritual seekers.
A valuable discovery under the world’s second-largest temperate wetland and in the traditional lands of the Cree and Ojibway casts light on the growing conflict among resource development, environmental stewardship, and Indigenous rights
When prospectors discovered a gigantic crescent of metal deposits under the James Bay Lowlands of northern Canada in 2007, the find touched off a mining rush, lured a major American company to spend fortunes in the remote swamp, and forced politicians to confront their legal duty to consult Indigenous Peoples about development on their traditional territories. But the multibillion-dollar Ring of Fire was all but abandoned when stakeholders failed to reach a consensus on how to develop the cache despite years of negotiations and hundreds of millions of dollars in spending. Now plans for an all-weather road to connect the region to the highway network are reigniting the fireworks.
In this colorful tale, Virginia Heffernan draws on her bush and newsroom experiences to illustrate the complexities of resource development at a time when Indigenous rights are becoming enshrined globally. Ultimately, Heffernan strikes a hopeful note: the Ring of Fire presents an opportunity for Canada to leave behind centuries of plunder and set the global standard for responsible development of minerals critical to the green energy revolution.
Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meet The Big Lebowski in this literary mystery that asks us to examine what stories, real or fiction, become the metaphors we use for working through our own challenges and uncertainties.
Twentysomething Austin lives alone in a crumbling office-turned-studio apartment of a former mops, brushes and brooms factory in Toronto. After a deformed and lice-ridden cat turns up at his door, then abruptly dies three weeks later, Austin begins to find frightening coincidences connecting him to a squatter living in his local Walmart, a botanical garden in Missouri, a shipping route from Greece, a muralist in Japan, the world of an online dystopia and more. As the obsession with piecing together the mystery surrounding his dead pet, and the reward the cat is potentially worth, takes over, Austin confronts his financial and family issues, his self-imposed isolation and his abandoned sense of direction. He discovers what purpose this mystery might actually serve in helping him cope with, and potentially recover, all that he’s really lost.
In the end, RIP Scoot is as much a story about an anomalous dead cat as it is a rich, conscientious depiction of grief, complicated relationships and the choices that occur when fighting change is no longer an option.