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Nature
All Books in this Collection
Showing 17–32 of 41 results
Garden
$20.00A rock-littered backyard in east-end Ottawa slowly becomes a garden in Monty Reid’s looping cycle and re-cycle of anti-paradisial poems. With his companion species, the shovel, Reid digs and un-digs, turning up the playful, the prickly, and the dangerous. Garden is yet another example of Reid’s original vision and restlessly independent voice.
Gatecrasher
$17.95Poems that revisit and revise concepts of self and land.
The poems in Gatecrasher reimagine social and familial relationships, personal and collective failures, and false nostalgias. Part surreal autobiography, and part observation of how physical and conceptual human-made structures are collapsing, this wildfire debut dreamwalks through the liminal space between expectation and disappointment, and the poet’s relationship to the BC landscape.
“We are in the presence of a formidably original poetic talent… This is an impressively mature first book.”—The Ormsby Review
Homesickness is a Forgotten Art
$17.95“Homesickness Is a Forgotten Art” is a compelling poetry collection that resonates with the echoes of a subtle presence. Open and attuned to what is, the poems portray complex reflections of deep human emotions and contradictions. Joël Pourbaix is curious about the world and he explores the enigma of the everyday: “I walk the line between the visible and the invisible; what more could you ask for?” The French-language edition of this book won the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry in the French language.
how the gods pour tea
$19.95This new collection by Lynn Davies, her first in eight years, abounds in departures: words and communities die, trout-lilies and passengers vanish, even the King and Queen of Fairies disappear.
In poem after poem, Davies’s powerful imagination blends observation and fancy, passion and playfulness, producing strikingly fresh metaphors. Squirrels paddle away on twig-rafts; giant horses take to the sky. Some poems give simple weight to the details of everyday life; others evoke an imaginative world inhabited by giant beavers, elf-thugs, and the great caw-dragon.
Throughout this magnificently fresh collection, the ocean, the rain, and the river suggest something big on the move in our lives even when we feel stranded. Displaying a dexterity of tone and an understated bravura, she writes of the extremities of losing and then awakening, honouring gratitude with “as many words as new leaves.”
How to Draw a Rhinoceros
$18.00How to Draw a Rhinoceros, the first book of poems by Canadian writer, scholar, and lawyer Kate Sutherland, mines centuries of rhinoceros representations in art and literature to document the history of European and North American encounters with the animal–from the elephant-rhinoceros battles staged by monarchs in the Middle Ages; the rhinomania that took hold in response to the European travels of Clara the ‘Dutch’ Rhinoceros in the mid-1700s; the menageries and circuses of the Victorian era; the exploits of celebrated twentieth-century hunters like Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway; and the trade in rhinoceros horn artefacts that thrives online today. Along the way, it explores themes of colonialism, animal welfare, and conservation, combining Robert Kroetschian documentary poetics with the meticulous research and environmental passion of Elizabeth Kolbert, to successfully examine the centuries-long path of the rhinoceros that’s brought it to the brink of global extinction.
Readers of contemporary poetry, as well as those interested in natural history, animal welfare, and conservation, and people who have followed Sutherland’s scholarly and literary careers, will relish the rich detail and odd tales of historical rhinoceroses and the people who have kept, shown, and traded in them, as depicted using a range of poetic techniques that only a critical eye like Sutherland’s could deliver.
I’d Write the Sea Like a Parlour Game
$14.95***2019 E.J. Pratt Poetry Award WINNER******2018 J.M. Abraham Poetry Prize FINALIST***Richly imagined and evocative, I’d Write the Sea like a Parlour Game explores the diversity and resilience that inhabit life at the margins, from tuckamore trails to the streets of a coastal city, with intimacy and often wry humour. This debut collection heralds an imaginative new voice, steeped in curiosity, and takes a fresh look at ageless poetic terrains.
Insomnia Bird
$20.00The poems in Kelly Shepherd’s Insomniac Bird are a cartography and a geography of Edmonton. The poems which shift between short, individual lyric pieces and found text emulate a black-billed magpie’s nest with the subject-matter and also physically, with the words and lines. The poems generate the theme of home (the bird’s nest, the city), and not feeling at home; sleeping, and the inability to sleep. The magpie (the insomnia bird) is the protagonist and the muse, the thread that connects everything to everything else in this work.
As such, Shepherd’s poems move across the surface at speed, like Edmonton’s NAIT train, and dive like magpies after the occasional tasty image or crumb of detail. The city as it spreads out across the Prairies, can do nothing to prevent urban sprawl, and grows taller with each new highrise building and office tower and sinks deeper into the ground, which is memory!
The city with purple fingers and black feathers
is bending branches outside the window.
In the photosensitivity of morning,
The city is an open window that can’t hear itself think.
While Shepherd’s poems are at times critical of Edmonton’s automobile culture and urban sprawl, his tone remains ironic rather than moralizing and he is consistent in his use of dark humour to avoid being didactic. With such guidance the poems effectively disclose what is not seen, what is repressed, what lies behind the scenes in the city he shares with magpies.
Kingdom, Phylum
$18.00Ecologically aware poems, hardwired to the intellect and the heart in equal measure.
Adam Dickinson’s poems, with firm intellectual bite and imaginative scope, reach fresh levels of poetic — and ecological — awareness. Sometimes reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, sometimes of Christopher Dewdney, and with the ghost of Foucault always in attendance, they ply a language that is cool and precise on the surface to open into the deep resonance of geologic time. Imaginative and contemplative, this writing is bound to refresh the vision of the most world-weary reader.
For some time, we expected
the end of the world
to be a mushroom.
A vengeful good, a good
of fire, clouded thought.
But every spring they come out of the ground
like universal suffrage,
a writ of habeas corpus,
speech before writing.
They say, dirt. They say, get up.from “The Good, part I”
The poems in Kingdom, Phylum push the boundaries of thought and language. Bringing lyrical and unsystematic modes of understanding into play, and keeping his ear tuned to the many disruptions involved in taxonomical arrangement, Dickinson shows how poetry both participates in, and unsettles, the provisional orders which develop between word and world.
” … a poet intensely, intricately, and metaphorically engaged with the world, the natural world in particular.” — League of Canadian Poets website
” … Dickinson’s poems are luminous, subtle, and exceptional.” — Books in Canada
Adam Dickinson is a professor of poetry and poetics at Brock University. His first book, Cartography and Walking (1-894078-22-5), was shortlisted for an Alberta Book Award. He lives in St. Catharines.
Lake of Two Mountains
$20.00A hymn to a beloved lake, a praise poem in forty-five parts, a contemplation of landscape and memory
Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré’s second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake’s northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it.
flint-dark far-off
sky on the move across the lake
slant sheets closing insky collapsing from its bowl
shoreline waiting taut
stones dark as plums
~from “Distance Closing In”
Landfall
$18.95In Landfall, Governor General’s Award-nominated poet Joe Denham revisits the plaguing environmental issues in the poetic journey he began ten years ago with his second collection, Windstorm. Writing in long elegy form, using a voice harnessed by concern, pathos, anger and empathy, Denham’s fourth collection is the result of age, time and love, drawing on the poet’s relationship to the world we think we know. Denham’s latest is a frustrated call to arms, told with the directness and compassion we’ve come to expect from him.”When we finally make landfall, when we torch the landfill or fall from the pedestal we’re perched upon, precarious precipice–when the men and women who want war want war to end: send me a postcard with a picture of your god pinned to a corkboard and the word of your god etched in desert sand in the hand of the first witness to survive… which ism should we use as filter?”–“Landfall”
Love in the Chthulucene (Cthulhucene)
$18.00In a collection grappling with #MeToo, climate change and political turmoil, Natalee Caple strives to discover a way forward in charged times. These poems look to acknowledge struggle, to re-evaluate society and to rethink our approach to art. This is a challenging collection, but also a personal one. As Caple explains in her acknowledgements, she “wrote these poems as gifts.” They were gifts to the people who have shaped her as a writer and a thinker, and now they are gifts to readers to show how one might try and find a way to keep creating that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all things, human and non-human.
No TV for Woodpeckers
$18.00In the pages of Gary Barwin’s latest collection of poetry, No TV for Woodpeckers, the lines between haunting and hilarious, wondrous and weird, beautiful and beastly, are blurred in the most satisfying ways. No stranger to poetic experimentation, Barwin employs a range of techniques from the lyrical to the conceptual in order to explore loss, mortality, family, the self and our relationship to the natural world.
Many of these poems reveal a submerged reality full of forgotten, unknown or invisible life forms that surround us?that are us. Within this reality, Barwin explores the connection between bodies, language, culture and the environment. He reveals how we construct both self and reality through these relationships and also considers the human in relation to the concepts of “nature” and “the animal.”
As philosophical as it is entertaining?weaving together threads of surrealism, ecopoetics, Dada and more?No TV for Woodpeckers is a complex and multi-layered work that offers an unexpected range of pleasures.
Odes & Laments
$18.00Through poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry that reveals the complexities of being human in an environment under threat. Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes, this wide-ranging and diverse collection plays with the yin and yang of everyday existence, employing lyricism, narrative, humour and an occasional dash of irreverence and fun through visual play with text and typography.
Off Leash
$18.95Everyone has a dog story, from the salesman at Home Depot to the passenger on a plane who confesses about the scar on his face. The poems in Mahoney?s third collection explore the concepts of identity and ownership through rich linguistic textures and voices. From a boy?s fascination with Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred to uniquely imagined Biblical dogs, Off Leash delves into the anguish of dogs loved and lost, and the joy of homecoming.
Oona River Poems
$20.00Peter Christensen began his writing career at the University of Lethbridge in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts and Science in Creative Writing. While there, he started up one of Alberta’s first literary magazines,Canada Goose with fellow writing student, Lorne Daniel.
Christensen juggled his literary writing career with his passion for exploring wilderness mountain areas of Alberta, BC, Yukon and NWT. He worked at various times as a guide, ranch hand, and Park Ranger. As a result, his working, writing, and literary career is diverse; his relationship with the natural world became his muse and is reflected in this collection. He lived in Oona River in the years it took him to write this collection.
Peter has published four books of poetry with Thistledown Press and one “best seller” of creative non-fiction stories with Heritage House Publishing. Several chapbooks were published by small presses in Canada and USA.
His poems have been published in numerous anthologies, writing journals, and literary magazines in Canada, Denmark, and USA, and he has performed many readings throughout Canada and the US. Peter collaborated with New Music Composer Robert Rosen, writing three librettos for the outdoor operas Canyon Shadows that were performed across Canada. “Hailstorm”, the title poem from his first book with Thistledown Press was arranged for voice and orchestra by Robert Rosen, performed internationally, was most recently sung by Michelle Todd at Carnegie Hall in New York, 2017.
Otolith
$19.95Winner, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Longlisted, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Memorial AwardOtolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader’s attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection. Born in the fecundity of British Columbia’s coastal rainforest, these poems are full of life and decay; they carry the odours of salmon rivers and forests of fir; salal growing in the fog-bound mountain slopes.
This astonishing debut, at once spare and lush, displays an exquisite lyricism built on musical lines and mature restraint. Nilsen turns over each idea carefully, letting nothing escape her attention and saying no more than must be said. Combining a scientist’s precision and a poet’s sensitivity, Otolith examines the ache of nostalgia in the relentless passage of time.