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Toward the Country of Light New and Selected Poems 1978-2018
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95This collection brings together Allan Cooper’s best poems over the last forty years. He weaves visions of nature with insight into the workings of the human heart. Read them individually or read them as a single long, flowing and eloquent narrative. The meditative and compassionate observations will transport the reader from the chaos of everyday life into a healing realm of possibility.
In Toward the Country of Light, the author offers open sonnets, prose poems, ghazals, small poems inspired by the Chinese and Japanese, and poems influenced by Robert Bly and Francis Ponge. As Cooper observes, “Over the years I’ve come to understand that the poem itself usually demands the form it takes and that language uses us for its own secret purposes.”
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The Way We Hold On
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95The Way We Hold On is Abena Beloved Green’s debut book of poetry. Her poems address cultural, social, and environmental issues, relationships, and reflect on everyday life as a small-town raised, semi-nomadic, first-generation Canadian. Here are poems about holding on and letting go—of ideas, opinions, beliefs, people, places, and things.
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The Other Side of the Sun The True Story of One Refugee’s Journey
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95As one of the boat people refugees, Thien escaped war-torn Vietnam on a harrowing journey that landed him in a Malaysian refugee camp. Thien Tang had an ordinary childhood living in South Vietnam until it became a Communist state. His father feared persecution of his family and sent his fourteen-year-old son into hiding for over a year. Upon his return, Thien attended a local high school and found a classmate sweetheart. Life once again was good. But it wasn’t meant to last. Thien was forced to go back into hiding again with no hope of return. Like thousands of others, he fled Vietnam on a crowded boat in search of a new life. But first he had to cross the treacherous South China Sea to reach Malaysia.
Thien’s ship was attacked by pirates and shot at by police. On land, he and his fellow refuges were jailed, starved, and beaten, but survival only brought on tougher challenges. The soldiers forced them at gunpoint back into their damaged boat to be towed to sea. He sought asylum in the United States but found the refuge he was seeking in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where he lives today.
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Signs of Life Images Formed from Words and Clay
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Gerri Frager has spent much of her life working in the care of critically ill infants and children and integrating the arts into patient care and education. Poetry and pottery have each been a sanctuary during tough times as has noticing the everyday beauty found in nature. In Signs of Life: Images formed from Words and Clay, the author merges these passions to create a most unique and insightful book. Each poem is accompanied by an image of pottery created by Frager, one reflected in and mirroring the other. Signs of Life is a powerful exploration into matters of loss and love through poetry and pottery and the life experiences of a medical professional who has dedicated her life to healing and comforting those she works with.
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Never Speak of This Again
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It is 1917 and Nellie, seventeen years old and pregnant, has just returned to Cape Breton from Boston to find her lover. Instead of a safe haven, she encounters rejection and humiliation and is told to clear out and never speak of this again. Nellie’s story reflects the lives of many Nova Scotia women who found their way to Boston. Her world becomes a matter of daily survival, while so many in the world, including the stranger from Truro, try to survive the catastrophic chaos of WWI and the Spanish Flu. Never Speak of This Again takes the reader from eastern Canada to western Canada, to Europe, and back again.
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Lucy Cloud
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Filled with engaging characters, with their unique and lively Cape Breton voices, Lucy Cloud follows the fortunes and heartaches of a family with secrets and the intense longing to live fully. Anne Lévesque delivers an authentic tale of a time and a place, where people must be strong and inventive to make a good life.
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Waking Up in my Own Backyard
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Join Sandra Phinney as she embarks on 31-day summer odyssey that takes place within a 100 kilometre radius from her home in rural Nova Scotia. This memoir is a journey of self-discovery wherein the author experiences the adventure of a lifetime in her own backyard. Two powerful themes flow throughout the narrative: the importance of friendships and the richness of rural living.
You won’t find what’s included in Waking Up In My Own Backyard in a typical visitor’s guide, but it will undoubtedly become an indispensable guide for locals and travellers alike. Phinney is an extraordinary tour guide. You will want to follow in her footsteps.
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The Mill Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95The Mill –Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest explores the power that a single industry can wield. For fifty years, the pulp mill near Pictou in northern Nova Scotia has buoyed the local economy and found support from governments at all levels. But it has also pulped millions of acres of forests, spewed millions of tonnes of noxious emissions into the air, consumed quadrillions of litres of fresh water and then pumped them out again as toxic effluent into nearby Boat Harbour, and eventually into the Northumberland Strait.
From the day it began operation in 1967, the mill has fomented protest and created deep divisions and tensions in northern Nova Scotia. This story is about people whose livelihoods depend on the pulp mill and who are willing to live with the “smell of money.” It’s about people whose well-being, health, homes, water, air, and businesses have been harmed by the mill’s emissions and effluent. It’s about the heartache such divisions cause and about people who, for the sake of peace, keep their thoughts about the mill to themselves.
But it’s also about hope, giving voice to those who led the successive groups that have protested and campaigned for a cleaner mill–First Nations, fishers, doctors, local councillors, tourism operators, artists and musicians, teachers and woodlot owners. Their personal stories are interwoven into a historical arc that traces the mill’s origins and the persistent environmental and social problems it causes to this day.
Baxter weaves a rich tapestry of storytelling, relevant to everyone who is concerned about how we can start to renegotiate the relationship between economy, jobs, and profits on one hand, and human well-being, health, and the environment on the other. The Mill tells a local story with global relevance and appeal.
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The Legacy Letters How Trauma Affects Our Lives
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Halifax author and journalist Janice Landry returns to her roots, as she revisits high-profile Canadian police investigations she covered as a novice television reporter during the 1980s and 1990s. One story involves the unsolved murder of British Columbia teenager Andrea King, whose remains were found in 1992, in Nova Scotia woods, nearly a year after she disappeared. Landry also discusses the 1989 disappearance of Nova Scotia teenager Kimberly McAndrew, who was last seen leaving a Halifax Canadian Tire store where she worked. McAndrew remains missing.
The victims and families have had a major impact on Landry and the public. She hopes this book leads to a break in both cases, as well as other unsolved crimes. It will also shed light on the pain the families continue to endure.
Landry also speaks with Canadians from five provinces, including first responders and front-line workers. These men and women bravely discuss how trauma, in and out of their work, has profoundly affected their lives, loved ones, and outlook.
The author and her guests each have written a “Legacy Letter” for the public. Each letter is deeply personal and conveys a heartfelt message of loss and hope. This book is Landry’s attempt to help them regain some of what has been lost.
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Rescue at Moose River
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95On Easter weekend in 1936, three men went down into an old rundown gold mine at Moose River in a remote area of Nova Scotia. While below, they became trapped by a massive cave-in at the 141-foot level. One man was a pediatrician, the second a young lawyer, and the third the mining company timekeeper. They had entered the mine to assess its potential for possible sale to an unnamed United States interest.
With the heroic efforts of more than 150 men and women volunteers, including local miners, hard rock miners from Ontario, draegermen from Pictou County, and a tenacious young diamond drill operator from Pictou County, two of the men were recovered alive. The third man died underground on the eighth day of their entombment.
Halifax broadcaster J. Frank Willis made history with his live reports from the mine head that were broadcast on more than 700 radio stations around the world, including the major U.S. networks and the BBC. It marked the beginning of a new era in broadcasting and in journalism. Until then, radio was known chiefly as a music and entertainment medium; news gathering and reporting had been the bailiwick of newspapers and newswire services.
Little did Willis know when he filed his first report from the site that he was making broadcast history by pioneering live on-the-spot reporting. It would change the face of broadcasting forever. Rescue at Moose River is the story of how these two events, one tragic, one historic, came together in the backwoods of Nova Scotia more than 80 years ago.
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Random Shots
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Random Shots tells the stories of survival against the odds, the life of a well-travelled risking-taking Maritime son. Fortunate to have survived numerous near misses during the lead-up to his eightieth trip around the Sun, Mossman has much to be grateful for along the paths taken to adventure.
As a strong defense over the passage of time, memory is everything. As narrator, Mossman, aided by diaries and recordings across the years, shares with vivid insight his travelling experiences in and around Lesotho, Northwest Territories, Gabon, the Bay of Fundy, Australia, the Congo, Zambia, Nunavut, New Zealand, the offshore Atlantic Ocean, Ontario, and Brazil.
Survival–the act of staying alive despite the odds–is the theme of the book. Many of these stories of adventure took place in a world far from the one with which most people are familiar. They are at once both startling and revealing and told with a bold style and wit that the author’s fans will immediately recognize.
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Homecoming The Road Less Travelled
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In these 13 carefully crafted short stories, Wayne Curtis explores the theme of homecoming, literally, spiritually, and metaphorically, and the many interpretations of the word “home”. The varied characters discover that home can be found in sometimes unlikely places. In “Night Riders” two teenagers find it on the highway in a stolen car, escaping an abusive institution, bonded together through their complicated love for each other. In “The Poet,” a man grasps for familiar old home feelings at a truck stop, where there is country music, drinks, and laughter. In “The Train,” an eleven-year-old boy finds that he longs to return home when his misjudged escape to town teaches him some hard lessons about who can be trusted.
With his characteristic eye for detail and his skillful ability to evoke emotion and atmosphere, Wayne Curtis once again takes readers into a different time, where people long for what makes them feel most anchored, loved, and valued in an ever-changing world.
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A Halifax Christmas Carol
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95It is December 1918. The old world–shaped by the values of Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens– is gone and the new world now wallows in post-war chaos and darkness.
A veteran of the gas attacks and trenches, Michael Bell has returned home to a city traumatized by war and devastated by an explosion, where he finds work at The Halifax Herald writing about what he sees as the truth, about an age defined only by lawlessness, disease, and disorder.
Then, four days before Christmas, Michael finds his truth-telling efforts challenged by a small, one-legged boy who arrives at the newspaper office with a single, silver twenty-five-cent piece for “the kids.” When the boy strangely disappears, the paper’s editor, Walter Stone, sees a potential Dickensian story for a city in desperate need of hope. He assigns Michael and new reporter Tess Archer the job of finding the boy and telling his story–all before the Christmas Eve edition.
At first, Michael objects, believing such stories to be dangerous lies in the face of the dark truths. However, after a mysterious dream of his mother leads to difficult questions, he accepts the assignment, if only to prove small acts of generosity are meaningless in the face of a growing darkness. Yet, as Michael follows his leads through an array of the city’s desperate people, he is increasingly haunted by the hidden meaning of his dream and soon realizes understanding will only come if he finds the boy. But for Michael and the city, time is fast running out.
Filled with a cast of compelling characters and vivid images, A Halifax Christmas Carol tells the story of a true age of darkness and the transformative power of hope.
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Caplin Scull Chronicles from a Newfoundland Outport on the Eve of Confederation
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Meet the unique people of Caplin Scull, a small village on Newfoundland’s sea-ravaged east coast, where life is hard and the times are changing as the province of Newfoundland is about to join the nation of Canada. Like the houses, those who live here must be sturdy, courageous and determined, able to withstand a rugged life in a world that still keenly feels the pull of its Irish ancestors and the influence of the powerful Catholic Church.
The collection is part oral history, part narrative, part documentary, part anecdote, all seasoned by time, memory, and reflection, and knitted together with love and a teaspoon or two of invention.
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Breaking Disaster Newspaper Stories of the Halifax Explosion
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95On December 6, 1917, the face of Halifax changed forever when the Imo, a Belgian Relief ship, collided with the French ship, the Mont Blanc. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., the Mont Blanc, which was carrying a large cargo of explosives, blew up. It destroyed much of the city’s north end and neighbouring communities like Tuft’s Cove and Dartmouth. The effect was catastrophic.
In Breaking Disaster, Ingram traces these details and stories as she pieces together the different narratives from the week that followed December 6, 1917, many of which have long faded into the larger story of the Halifax Explosion.
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Unpacked From PEI to Palawan
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“I hadn’t always been lost, but Prince Edward Island had suddenly become too small for my grief. My grief needed the whole world.”
In 2008, Maureen and Mitch Cobb took drastic action in the wake of the stillbirth death of their second child, Tya. They packed up two-year-old Leila and set out on a journey through Southeast Asia, a trip of courage, love, and, ultimately, redemption.
Unpacked is the inspiring story of a mother in search of herself, a husband and wife fighting for a marriage, a young daughter who rises from confusion, and the scenes and revelations that bring Mo out of her paralyzing grief and into the perspective of a new world.
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Seven Grains of Paradise A Culinary Journey in Africa
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Seven Grains of Paradise tells the fascinating and much neglected story about many kinds of food in Africa, a continent with a rich farming tradition, intricate cuisines, and a multitude of food cultures.
Here is the story of Baxter’s personal quest to learn about some fascinating and new (to her) foods in a handful of countries in sub-Sahara Africa as she visits African farms, markets, restaurants, and kitchens. The people who grow, sell, buy, prepare, and serve the foods help her explore the riddles of a continent better known for hunger than for its plentiful food resources. The author draws on stories and research conducted over the more than thirty years she has lived and worked in Africa.
From the fabled city of Timbuktu on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert to the rainforests of Central Africa, readers are invited along on a delightful journey of learning and eating–and some drinking too, of invigorating indigenous beverages, brews, and palm wine straight from the trees. The culinary journey takes the reader down garden paths, into forests that double as farms, through the chaos of markets, and into modest little roadside eateries.
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Scars and Other Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“The scar didn’t use to show,” says Daniel, the narrator of the title story. But scars have a way of manifesting themselves, visually or otherwise, and the stories in this collection illustrate a varied compendium of characters marked in some way by their injuries.
Having lost a breast to cancer, a young woman visits a psychic seeking answers to the questions in her life. A bullied boy finds solace in the arrival of another unfortunate who has attracted the attention of his tormentors. A divorced father attempts to shield his young daughter from the trauma of tragedy. An eight-year-old boy witnesses death for the first time, a massage therapist is unnerved by the discovery he makes about a new client, and a young widow flounders in her struggle to cope with the loss of her husband. These and other characters come to vivid life in stories told with the sensitivity and skill that have earned the author continued critical praise.
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The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers
Editor: Julia Swan, Lesley ChoycePublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In this poignant, often funny, and heartfelt collection, Nova Scotia authors and artists put to the page their thoughts and emotions about their fathers, who raised, inspired, loved, and taught them–and occasionally drove them crazy. As well as MacLeod, Bruneau, and Murray, The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers includes stories by Harry Thurston, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Frank Cameron, Joan Baxter, Jon Tattrie, Bruce Graham, Lesley Choyce, Lenore Zann, David Mossman, Janice Landry, Lindsay Ruck, Ian Colford, Julia Swan, Craig Flinn, and Daniel Paul.
Here are fathers of all kinds: quiet, thoughtful, wise men; stubborn and headstrong men; and men whose careers and circumstances called forth public bravery and heroism. Included too are fathers whose mark on the world is more private but just as compelling, just as fearless, just as noteworthy. They embody the strength everyone needs to weather the storms of life, the humour that helps us to laugh at crucial moments, and the stalwart vision it takes to raise daughters and sons and send them out into the world.
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Daniel Paul Mi’kmaw Elder
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Born in a log cabin during a raging blizzard on Indian Brook Reserve in 1938, Mi’kmaw elder Daniel N. Paul rose to the top of a Canadian society that denied his people’s civilization. When he was named to the Order of Canada, his citation called him a “powerful and passionate advocate for social justice and the eradication of racial discrimination.” His Order of Nova Scotia honour said he “gives a voice to his people by revealing a past that the standard histories have chosen to ignore.”
But long before the acclaim, there was the Indian Agent denying food to his begging mother. There was the education system that taught him his people were savages. There was the Department of Indian Affairs that frustrated his work to bring justice to his people.
Now, for the first time, here is the full story of his personal journey of transformation, a story that will inspire Canadians to recognize and respect their First Nations as equal and enlightened civilizations.
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Much Madness, Divinest Sense Women’s Stories of Mental Health and Health Care
Editor: Lori Hanson, Nili Kaplan - MyrthPublisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It is time to shed some light on the dark halls and windowless rooms where women’s mental health has been hidden from view. Where are the stories? Where are their voices? In historical and psychiatric records, women’s mental health is reduced to verifiable symptoms and causes, devoid of the subjective, absent of the lived experience. When confronted with their protestations and self-representations, our medical system and our societal institutions further pathologize, retrauamtize or silence women. Much Madness, Divinest Sense is a collection of women’s stories and essays about mental health and health care. These women–physicians, psychotherapists, social workers, community activists, health researchers, Indigenous women, transgender women, our neighbors, daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers who are the recipients, providers and critics of care–break the silence to talk about the polluted, heart-wrenching, stigmatized, messy subject that is mental illness today. As with their first collection, Women Who Care: Women’s stories of health care and caring, the stories, essays and poems of women receiving, accompanying, critiquing or giving mental health care are again in this compilation as raw as they are real.
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Nebooktook In the Woods
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95In Nebooktook, Mike Parker once again pays homage to our wilderness heritage and those who, in days gone by, revelled in a life in the woods. In today’s world, primitive wilderness places are more “visionary” than “actual. ” The call of the loon is being drowned out by the industrial roar of “men who dig up and tear down and destroy.” Newspaper headlines bemoan a myriad of environmental concerns and issues almost daily as beleaguered politicians and bureaucrats, entrusted to responsibly manage natural resources and safeguard the environment, are taken to task.
In order to keep us grounded in the environmental riches we once possessed and where we should be heading, Parker reminds us of the beauty and power of the wilderness. He goes beyond mere documentation and offers a heartfelt call to see the wild places of Nova Scotia as more than a source for pillage and profit. Nebooktook, which in the Mi’kmaw language means “in the woods,” is an eclectic mix of history, heritage, ideology, nostalgia, philosophy, poetry, and prose. Set in Nova Scotia, the more than three hundred early-twentieth-century images appearing here could just as easily have been taken in any number of wilderness areas stretching from the Adirondacks to the Rockies. The book’s message is equally timeless and universal, spanning centuries and drawing upon scores of voices from a variety of disciplines and professions. Nebooktook is reflective, introspective, meditative, and thought-provoking. While it decries the practices and doctrines that wantonly destroy and pollute, more importantly the book celebrates the traditions, natural beauty, and intrinsic values of our woods and waters.
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Redemption Songs How Bob Marley’s Nova Scotia Song Lights the Way Past Racism
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Redemption Songs tells the extraordinary story of how one of Bob Marley’s greatest songs was born in Nova Scotia. It opens with Marley’s live acoustic performance of Redemption Song at the end of his life, and reveals that the core lyric comes from a speech Marcus Garvey delivered in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in 1937.
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What a Friend We have in Gloria
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Gloria Belding has just hurled a rock through her neighbour’s window, scattering broken glass in all directions and barely missing Duddy McGill. Now she waits, fogged with drink, for the police to handcuff her and haul her away. She’s been down this road many times and expects to go before a judge, get fined and then get on with her sorry, alcoholic life.
But Gloria is wrong. She gets a chance to turn her life around. In Bruce Graham’s heartwarming and hilarious new book, the final book of the Snake Road trilogy, he takes readers back to the close-knit and quirky community, picking up where Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore left off. It is a story of romance, love and reformation as Gloria discovers the road back to health and happiness is not a straight line. While Gloria learns new survival skills at Carson’s Point, back on the Parrsboro shore, Minnie is struggling to adjust to life after Duddy’s reformation. There’s other news as well. A new arrival has taken up residence in Mink Martin’s trailer and made a “breakthrough” discovery of his own: an artifact of great historical significance.
What A Friend We Have in Gloria is classic Bruce Graham, filled with all the usual weirdness of his kooky characters and the strange goings-on on this twisty little road in rural Nova Scotia. This time, the focus is on Gloria, former lover of Mink Martin, in a story that proves no matter how far down you sink in life, you can rise again.
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Nova Scotia Love Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In Nova Scotia Love Stories, Lesley Choyce has assembled some of the province’s most beloved authors who explore through fact and fiction the myriad ways in which a love story exists. These writers with a strong emotional connection to this shaped-by-the-sea province demonstrate the many guises and moods of love: for the young, the aged and all points in between. There is love that is healing, heart-throbbing joyful, but also love that is disillusioned, unusual, possibly misguided, but always life-changing. The stories are heartwarming, touching, funny, and profound. This collection will convince any reader that love thrives and abides here on the wave-swept shores of Nova Scotia.
A young girl experiences profound attraction to the enigmatic but charismatic Manuel Jenkins in Budge Wilson’s tale; a child tells of having two mothers in Bruce Graham’s short story; and Marjorie Simmins and Silver Donald Cameron each describe how they met and fell in love, bridging their lives from opposite coasts of Canada. Maureen Hull’s Miranda finds herself in a relationship with a rather unlikely partner; Jim Lotz and Lindsay Ruck tell of real-life love stories: deep, long-standing commitment between two kindred souls, through a lifetime of shared adventures.
There are other jewels here from Jon Tattrie, Steven Laffoley, Sheldon Currie, Harold Horwood, Carol Bruneau, Michael Ungar, William Kowalski, Don Aker, Chris Benjamin, and Lesley Choyce. Collectively, these writers explore many facets of this most human emotion.
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In the Country
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In the Country is a collection of Wayne Curtis’s unflinching but lovingly told stories of the hardships of rural life for his generation. Despite an abiding love for the natural settings in which he himself grew up, Wayne describes the restrictions facing young people who yearned for a life beyond the farm. Country life, with its tranquility and beauty, its seasonal rhythms and gifts, also held many boys and girls back from achieving their potential.
The setting is rural New Brunswick in days gone by but not easily forgotten. It is a fictional world where the harsher realities of the time come sharply into focus. The old man in “The Last Hunt,” for example, embodies the dashed dreams and festering frustrations that make this final hunt of his life so charged with emotion. In the title story, a young woman soon realizes the death of her father has put an end to her educational goals as well, for now her duty is to help the family on the farm.
Many young country people wanted to mix easily with their more sophisticated contemporaries, but encountered insurmountable obstacles. Feelings of inferiority and embarrassment were often the result among those who lacked the social skills to navigate town relationships. In “The Falconer Spring,” Wayne captures the palpable longing, excitement but ultimately limitations two cousins experience on a trip to town. The sister in “Of Fall and Winter Rain” pays the ultimate price for her longing and naivété. The stories assembled here are both tragic and tender, told with Wayne’s evocative, precise prose.
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After Swissair
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95On September 2, 1998, Swissair Flight 111 plunged into the sea near the mouth of St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia, killing all 229 on board. Thousands of people responded immediately: emergency personnel, fishermen, the military, divers, community searchers and RCMP officials. In the days, weeks and months after the crash, local residents and ordinary people supported the investigation in any way they could and, more critically, they also sought to comfort the families of the victims.
In the face of this almost unimaginable event, many experienced enormous suffering and world views were changed forever for the survivors – both the friends and relatives of the victims as well as support teams and the local communities of St. Margaret’s Bay, Halifax and beyond. What carried so many of them through this tragedy was the astonishing generosity and kindness each group gave to the other. As Wilson writes, “We all needed the families as much as they needed us.”
She wrote this collection of poems “in gratitude and in celebration of the thousands of men and women who suffered – and sometimes triumphed – during the months and years that followed the crash.” The poems reveal the depth of the impact the crash of Swissair 111 had on so many people.
Over the past 17 years, Wilson has been informed and inspired by the families of the victims, workers on land and sea, observers, professionals and by the local residents she has interviewed. She wove together these experiences to create a poetic vision of the sea change that occurred because of what Nova Scotians saw, heard or imagined about people they had never met, revealing the wonder of the sheer courage and generosity of the human spirit.