Crows Do Not Have Retirement, David Zieroth's sixth book of poems, explores the many lives of the spirit and the flesh: lives that challenge, bewilder and excite. With the fluidity of language and sharpness of image that he is known for, Zieroth voyages through the conflicting worlds of dream and everyday life, exploring feelings of extreme self-ir …

For as long as we have communicated by words, men and women have turned to poets to help them express the surges of emotion that accompany the feelings we call romantic love. Recognizing that "love's domain is as huge, as vast as Canada itself," acclaimed poet Tom Wayman set out in 1997 to compile an anthology of the nation's best poetry on the sub …

In January 1887 a delegation of chiefs from the Nisga'a and Tsimshian peoples of northern British Columbia, seeking restitution from a government that had stolen their lands without a treaty or compensation, arrived by steamship in Victoria's Inner Harbour. They were met by Premier William Smithe, who refused them entry to the provincial legislatur …

The heart of this fresh and eclectic look at BC's history is an enormously popular 11-part series that ran in the Vancouver Province newspaper late in 1999. Starting with the years before the Europeans arrived, the book chronicles the life and times of BC through the decades, with plenty of photographs from public and private archives in large and …

The long-awaited sequel to BC children's classic Jason and the Sea Otter.

This delightful story of a Nuu-chah-nulth boy explores First Nations traditions and values through the making of a canoe. Jason's first canoe is crushed during a storm, and he must replace it. Through Uncle Silas, he learns the traditional methods of canoe building - plus scor …

By the time Al Purdy succumbed to lung cancer at his waterfront home in Sidney BC on April 21, 2000, he was universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest writers Canada has produced. In five decades as a published author he had produced over forty books and received innumerable distinctions, including two Governor General's Awards and the Orde …

With introductions, commentary and five new poems derived from Donne's elegies by Doug Beardsley and Al Purdy. In 1998, the poets Al Purdy and Doug Beardsley spent many hours in Victoria's Waddling Dog Pub discussing the often-neglected poetry of D.H. Lawrence. The result was No One Else is Lawrence!, acclaimed by readers across the country.

This ti …

The Bare Plum of Winter Rain is the latest collection of poetry by award-winning poet Patrick Lane, author of more than 20 published books of poetry. An icon in the Canadian literary scene, Lane has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, including the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1979 for Poems, New and Selected, the Canadian Authors' …

In the middle of a March night nearly thirty years ago, a heavy fog rolls in off the Gulf of Georgia to smother a small fishing town at the mouth of the Fraser River. Ominous and unsettling, the fog sets the scene for a compelling series of events that will forever alter the town and the people who live there - especially the Mawsons, one of the ma …

In April 1999, the Inuit dream of a self-governing territory in the eastern Arctic - Nunavut (Our Land) - became a reality. In celebration of this historic event comes a new edition of Inuit Journey, a firsthand account of another turning point in Inuit history: the establishment in the early 1960s of member-owned, member-run Inuit co-operatives, w …

"In the five years since the Flying Canucks series began," says Pigott, "I have never ceased to marvel that everything connected with aviation in Canada took place in the proverbial blink of an eye." It is barely nine decades since Casey Baldwin became the first Canadian to achieve sustained flight, and only seventy-odd years since J. Dalzell McKee …

Writing in his introduction to McCarthy's book She Reminds Me of Vermeer, Al Purdy says: "I have the sense of seeing things with her eyes and mind, of actually being in her situation, and it's this intimacy that gives her poems power."

Bittersweet and gently insightful, the poems in Sneaking through the Evening are marked with the fastidious attenti …

In this new collection, Canadian poet Tom Wayman, long honoured for his incisive observations on life in the workplace and the classroom, takes a more personal turn. Many of these poems celebrate the gains and losses of "middle-aging," while others reflect on the deaths of parents and friends. Readers of "Life with Dick" and "The Big O" will be rel …

A young brother and sister in the village of Sliammon must go out after dark to fetch their grandmother, and even though they are good children, they are caught by The One Who Takes Bad Children. It is up to the brother and sister to free themselves and all the other children by doing what they have been taught: stay calm, pay attention, and use ev …

Populations of Woodland Caribou and other large mammals are declining across Canada. Hundreds of "problem bears" are killed each year on government orders. Salmon stocks in BC are in danger of going the way of the East Coast cod. The quality and quantity of Canada's fresh water, one of our most precious resources, can no longer be taken for granted …

"What are memories?" writes Eric Nicol in this volume. "Laundered biography?" In this case, memoirs are the rollicking, funny life and times of Eric Nicol.

How I Joined Humanity at Last, David Zieroth's fifth book of poems, explores the mid-life road to renewal and tells the story of one man's journey toward compassion.

Zieroth's work delves deeply into the issues that affect all of us, from relationships between children and parents and "the old blood turbulence/ of families, tribes," to the day-to-d …

With unique insight and straightforward prose, Wingwalkers tells the saga of Canada's other airline, a scrappy western mongrel that, through eight decades and numerous name changes--Canadian Airways, Queen Charlotte Airlines, CP Air, PWA, Wardair and Canadian Airlines International--transformed itself from a bush flying and mining operation into an …

Patrick Lane, one of Canada's most distinguished and acclaimed poets, has published over twenty books of poetry in his long career. This collection, the only comprehensive book of his poetry since 1988, gathers together the work of two decades, presenting his best work as a mature poet.

Mrs. Amor de Cosmos has been entertaining British Columbia's commercial fishermen for over 15 years with her popular "A Letter From Home" columns. In 1981, her letters became a feature of the national tabloid newspaper Canadian Fishing Report, and in 1992, her columns began appearing each month in British Columbia's leading commercial fishing magaz …

Since 1919, the Memorial Cup championship has provided excitement for all hockey fans and happy hunting grounds for National Hockey League scouts. It has shaped the way junior hockey is played in North America. Harbour Publishing is proud to present the very first book devoted to our national junior final and its heart-pounding history.

So come on i …

A selection of poems by the man described by the Globe & Mail as "the greatest of our poets." Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets includes three decades' worth of thought-provoking work, including poems from the Governor-General's Award-winning The Cariboo Horses to Naked with Summer in Your Mouth.

Purdy personally made this selection, assisted by S …

Too Spare, Too Fierce, a new collection of love poems and elegies, is the twenty-second volume of poetry Patrick Lane - hailed as "the best poet of his generation" - has produced during his 30-year career as a writer.

During the years Al Purdy was becoming one of Canada's best-loved poets, he also wrote and published many pages of distinctive prose. This selection of almost forty years of essays and anecdotes is vintage Purdy. Part I, No Other Country, consists of essays on seeing the world as a Canadian. It begins as a fascinating travel diary as Purdy takes th …

Raincoast Chronicles, Spilsbury's Coast, The Accidental Airline, A Hard Man to Beat, The Men There Were Then. . . and now another one to top off the list. Writing in the Rain features the same fascination with British Columbia and the same ability to bring its stories to life that have brought Howard White numerous awards and accolades, including t …

"Paul Bunyan was in BC, that much we can prove. For evidence there is the Inside Passage, the Gulf Islands, Mount Baker and canned meat." So begins Paul Bunyan on the West Coast, a chronicle of Paul's last adventures, when he worked his way across the continent and finally reached the great conifer forests of the West Coast. It was here he faced hi …

Harvey Reginald MacMillan (1885-1976) is one of the most significant figures in Canadian corporate history. Born into extreme poverty in rural Ontario, MacMillan continued his education after high school and went on to study at Yale. Despite serious setbacks, including a bout with tuberculosis, MacMillan persevered, and in 1912 became the first chi …

The Wastell family had much to contend with on a daily basis. Besides running a sawmill and surviving in very un-genteel circumstances, Norris's mother, a registered nurse, was the only source of medical help in the community. Not surprisingly, she had to treat all types of ailments ranging from pneumonia to severed fingers and deliver numerous bab …

Lonely in a Cool, Sweet Way is the latest collection of poems by a writer whom Al Purdy has compared to Emily Dickinson and Margaret Avison. "I have the sense of seeing things with her eyes and mind," Purdy said in his introduction to her first book, She Reminds Me of Vermeer, "of actually being in her situation, and it's this intimacy that gives h …

Radical Innocence is an "invitation to reverie," a collection of poems that is at once suffused with marvels and a brilliant historical and cultural critique of our society's development. In this ambivalent look at classical christian attitudes and how they have influenced the western world, Pass moves beyond the ordinary, taking images and persona …

Great Canadian hockey stars aren't born, they're made - many of them, like Bobby Clarke, in the teams that make up the Western Hockey League. This first history of the WHL, tracing the league from its establishment in the 1960s to the present day, has all the stories of all the teams, coaches and stars: who they are (or were), how their skills deve …

Tom Wayman has been writing and publishing the poetry of everyday life for over twenty years. This anniversary collection gathers the best of Wayman's published work from eleven previous volumes, along with some provocative new poems, in celebration of his commitment to honest, accessible writing with a sense of humour.

Although Wayman laments the d …

This collection of poems is steeped in the west coast tradition of storytelling and mythmaking, a tradition Howard White has nurtured for two decades. The poems are as real, down-to-earth and funny as White's award-winning prose.

He admits to having a messy yard, describes city street crazies and the late-night "undermind," teaches his boys how to h …

Long known to insiders as one of the most unique personalities in Canadian letters, the celebrated poet Al Purdy begins this story of his life by noting that just as he was about to be born his hometown of Trenton was flattened by a historic explosion as the local munitions factory, "no doubt accounting for any oddity and eccentricity in my charact …

As a young man living in England at the time of the Allied Landing at Dieppe, Canadian novelist and screenwriter Ernest Langford acquired a special affection for the Canadian soldiers who fought so valiantly and suffered so harshly in the ill-fated raid.

On August 19,1942, Major-General J. M. Roberts led 5000 troops of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Divi …

The Canada goose, a beloved cultural symbol for Canadians, is the inspiration for this story for children. It starts near the pulp mill at Powell River, BC, the unlikely spot where two mother Canada geese decide to lay their eggs. Some of the goslings are hatched in an incubator, then end up at a stump ranch where they decide that Crocus the Chines …

In his introduction to this provocative collection of essays, George Woodcock describes his response to a recent question about national unity. "I remarked impatiently that what interested me was not the achievement of 'national unity, but the accomplishment of creative anti-national disunity."

Woodcock argues that if Canadians are angry about their …

Sixty stunning duotone photographs by Wakayama, documenting the history of the Powell Street Festival, are interwoven here with the voices of some eighty people involved with the Festival - people of Japanese descent and many other ethnic backgrounds.

The Festival is an annual Vancouver event celebrating the history and culture of Japanese people in …

These rollicking ballads and poems come from the great oral tradition of BC woodsmen during the first half of this century - when real men not only read poetry but wrote it and recited it and bought it.

Robert Swanson, once known as the "Bard of the Woods," is one of many men who knows and loves BC coast bunkhouse ballads, but he is one of a very fe …

Edith Iglauer has been a journalist for four decades, working for The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. This book is a lively retrospective of her writings, from the 1940s when she covered Eleanor Roosevelt's press conferences, through the 1960s when she was present at the founding of Canada's first Inuit co-operati …

The Hour's Acropolis, John Pass's tenth book of poetry, is a classical meditation rebounding between domesticity and myth. Ben Johnson's Olympic disgrace is counterpoint to poetry's inspirational lightning, Steve Fonyo appears next to Odysseus, Orpheus listens to Lou Reed.

Stylistically, this book is a complex and ingenious construct, a poetic acrop …

Why did Canada abandon four decades of peace to join the United States in the Persian Gulf War? The author of this provocative book argues that Canada's status as a nuclear colony of the US military paves the way for Canadian participation in American military adventures abroad. One nuclear outpost is Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island, where the US N …

In this tale, the ever-wily, ever-hungry Raven visits the generous Snipe family, in the hope of getting lots of free food. When she gets a bit too greedy, however, she finds out the Snipes have a few tricks of their own.

Paperwork, a provocative sampling of the best new work writing in North America, breaks this taboo. These poems are written by people who build houses and machines, catch fish, take care of children, manage companies, work hard at looking for work, and much more. The writing is funny and tough and sad and angry, and the poems come from insiders - m …

When Jim Spilsbury, B.C's most famous pioneer entrepreneur, teams up with master storyteller and literary craftsman Howard White, the result is a spell-binding romp up and down British Columbia's rugged coast; eighty years of fascinating anecdotes and memories distilled into 190 pages.

Jim Spilsbury grew up in a tent on Savary Island, squatting on c …

Raven is clever and tricky - and greedy. In this story, she persuades her friends Gull, Cormorant, and Puffin to pick berries with her, and tricks them into doing more than their share of work, for less than their share of food. In the end, her friends find a clever way to teach Raven an important lesson.

Two fishermen find a whale trapped in their net; neither of them can swim so they must trust the whale to support them while they put away the net and get back to the boat. . . In the wilderness of the Peace River, a man performs delicate surgery on his sick comrade, without anaesthetic, and with only the assistance of a doctor's voice on the radio …

One of Canadian poetry's best-kept secrets is Maureen McCarthy, whose first book She Reminds Me of Vermeer drew accolades across the country. Nine years later, her second collection drew even higher praises.

"I have the sense of seeing things with her eyes and mind, of actually being in her situation, and it's this intimacy that gives her poems pow …

Once regarded as British Columbia's "voice from the bunkhouse" for his powerful logging poems, Peter Trower, has produced a new collection about life "after the bunkhouse" - seventy new poems about cities and small towns, travel and love.

The Canadian Poetry Contest was launched to provide funds to help Canada India Village Aid in its programme of building dams and digging wells to counter the serious drought conditions that have arisen in northwestern India. A total of 1,255 poets entered no less than 3,223 poems. This collection includes the six prize-winning poems by John Pass (f …