All Books

Understories explores the meeting of the natural, suburban and inner-city experiences of Prince George. These poems look beneath the daily observations of a place jostled between stripmalls and pubs, the university and the mill, and a landscape that presses in at every corner, revealing a sometimes gritty underside. Al Rempel’s poetry kicks the snow off alleyways, tramps around a fallen-in trapper’s cabin, or sneaks onto the neighbour’s front lawn – all with a wink and a nod.

Undone is a cornucopia of passionate poems arranged into three sections. “Forgotten” has mostly to do with the aftermath of a heart-rending breakup; “Kindred” features poems on fellow artists in poetry, music and painting (ranging from Georgia O’Keeffe to Snoopy, beagle-novelist); in “Apprentice,” leaving is transformed into celebration, poem after poem about fierce loving of a world that we will have to leave. In these hard-hitting, highly personal poems, lamentation is a key note. Crushing loneliness weighs heavily on the spirit. But Sue Goyette has ways of sharing pain with a compensating lift: wonderful flights of metaphor, language charged with verbal energy. “Isn’t that our job,” she asks, “to coax out the light in the story?” It’s a job she takes to heart and performs brilliantly.

The poems in Undone have the amplitude proper to “watching wide” – a discipline good for seeing shooting stars and, as this book illustrates, all other kinds of light in a darkness palpable but never enveloping, not when probed so truly and sung so beautifully.

“If I had to do it again, I’d place a stethoscope on the heart of us
Sooner. I’d prescribe Neruda, not the despair but the slow blossom of 20 kisses.

Goodbye, goodbye to the slippery duvet of this bed. The cold floor
of awake and how hope can have insomnia, spend the whole night wishing.

Heartbreak is a geological occurrence.”

from “A Version of Courage”

Ambulance lights flash as a baby is born on a busy city street, pine beetles paint forests a palette of new colours, a young boy faces a watery death under the ice of a frozen lake, and a mother stands in a bathtub at midnight wearing only her gumboots. In this anthology of new writing, women poets from Northern BC share their refreshing, intriguing, mystical and sometimes mythical insights into rural and urban life. Unfurled is a unique blend of emerging and familiar voices and includes work from Gillian Wigmore, Jacqueline Baldwin, Sarah de Leeuw, Donna Kane, Laisha Rosnau, Leanne Boschman and Jamella Hagen–truly a celebration of the women of the North.