Borrowed Rooms

by Barbara Pelman

tagged: canadian

Description

These poems, spare and nuanced, explore the borrowed rooms we inhabit in personal relationships: the temporary homes of marriage and parenting; the personas we carry for a little while and must ultimately abandon. In tight and unsentimental poems, Barbara Pelman grieves the death of a father, notes the changing dynamics of mothers and daughters, watches the doors irrevocably close on a marriage, and delights in the temporal beauty surrounding her: the simple splendour of garry oak and hawthorn, arbutus branches bent to the shape of wind, and the stutter of shoreline.

About the Author

Barbara Pelman has an MA in Literature from the University of Toronto, and lives in Victoria, BC. She has taught high school and university English courses for three decades and is now retired. She has three books of poetry: One Stone (Ekstasis Editions, 2005), Borrowed Rooms (Ronsdale Press, 2008) and Narrow Bridge (Ronsdale Press, 2017), and a chapbook Aubade Amalfi (Rubicon Press, 2016). Many of her poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies, and her glosa, “Nevertheless,” won the Malahat Review Poetry Contest in 2018. She is an active member of Victoria’s vibrant poetry community, assisting at Planet Earth Poetry and conducting workshops. She is also a frequent traveller to Vancouver to visit her mother, and her daughter and grandson.

Contributor Notes

For many years Barbara Pelman has taught English at high school and college, primarily in B.C. Born in Vancouver, she has degrees from the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. She has been an active participant in the Victoria writing community: as a member of the Random Acts of Poetry team, a regular reader at Planet Earth Poetry, and the instigator of Victoria's "Poetry Walls," created by her students, in the downtown core.

About BC Books Online

Borrowed Rooms

by Barbara Pelman

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