The Anachronicles is a collection of unusually rich poems that are both proto- and post-colonial. The title itself - melding the two words "anachronism" and "chronicle" - points to how the poems explore events and exchanges in one place from two points in time.

The series of Craft Perception and Practice volumes gives recognition to the exciting new developments in contemporary craft practice and scholarship. This second volume brings together 22 essays and critical commentaries by 19 independent critics and curators, professional artists, art historians, and studio art instructors. Illustrated with 40 co …

Utopic Impulses: Contemporary Ceramics Practice brings together ten essays and twenty artist projects to explore ceramics as a socially responsible practice. By framing particular ceramics practices as "utopic impulses," this anthology envisions new and stimulating conceptions of how studio ceramics contribute to the social and political fabric of …

To Harold Rhenisch, poetry is a wisdom path equal to Zen, or a pilgrimage on the holy road from Seville to Minsk. Here is a breadth of musicality ranging from solo piano improvisations to jazz quartets, klezmer music, music hall, and even operatic arias. In this spirited celebration of the creative spirit, Rhenisch presents a vision of the world th …

This young adult historical novel focuses on Charlotte and her family, Loyalists who are forced to flee their home in the Mohawk Valley as a result of the violence of the “Sons of Liberty” during the American Revolution. At the beginning, fifteen-year-old Charlotte Hooper is separated from her sweetheart, Nick, who sympathizes with the Revoluti …

When sixteen-year-old Sarah from Toronto learns that she is to spend the summer with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, she is convinced that it will be the most tedious summer ever. She gets off to a rough start when she meets Luke, the nephew of her grandmother's friend, and one unfortunate event leads to another. Just when she thinks her summer ca …

After reading this collection, you will never look at mothers - at the playground, at the elementary school, or across the kitchen table - in quite the same way again. Beginning with a poem of pregnancy, written by her twenty-five year old self, Joanne Arnott leads us through a span of twenty years of inward- and outward-facing struggles, centred f …

When sixteen-year-old Sarah from Toronto learns that she is to spend the summer with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, she is convinced that it will be the most tedious summer ever. She gets off to a rough start when she meets Luke, the nephew of her grandmother’s friend, and one unfortunate event leads to another. Just when she thinks her summer …

In recent years Mennonites have become one of the most visible ethnic literary communities in Canada. With the publication of Half in the Sun, BC writers of Mennonite heritage claim their place in this community. The authors represented in Half in the Sun are West Coast writers who share a history rooted in a dark region littered with stories of re …

This historical time-travel novel, for children ten and up, is the third volume in Cathy Beveridge's ongoing series on Canadian disasters. Once again we meet Jolene and her twin brother Michael, this time in an RV on the shores of the Great Lakes, where her father and grandfather are conducting research into the Great Storm of 1913. When Grandpa di …

Eloquent, poignant and witty, Garry Gottfriedson's new collection of poetry, Whiskey Bullets, approaches an old genre with a new flare that will challenge your expectations of cowboy poetry. This edgy collection explores themes of duality that exist in the parallel worlds of cowboys and Indians.

Often satirical, Whiskey Bullets is a testament to ada …

Marya Fiamengo's first collection of poems, The Quality of Halves, was published in 1958 when the poet was thirty-one. Subsequent volumes, including Overheard at the Oracle (1969). Silt of Iron (1971), In Praise of Old Women (1976), North of the Cold Star (1978), Patience After Compline (1989) and White Linen Remembered (1996), have developed an in …

Speaking of Kevin Roberts, the Australian writer Nigel Krauth says, "Roberts takes the common man's point of view and proves that humanity is still connected to the great turning of the universe." Certainly this "New and Selected" provides ample evidence of Roberts' sense of connectedness, as he selects the best from his previous eleven books of po …

In his autobiography, John Koerner explores the underpinnings of his long life as a painter in a lavishly illustrated art book with full-page colour prints of his paintings and many black and white photos and drawings. Koerner describes his early life in Czechoslovakia, his art and philosophy studies at the Sorbonne, and his life as a student in th …

Jean Coulthard demonstrated that a Canadian woman could be a successful professional composer, whose music was, and still is, played extensively in concert halls across Canada and internationally. Through her seven-decade career she composed in every genre of traditional classical music: opera, symphonies, concerti, chamber music, keyboard, voice, …

Reckless women inhabit the spaces of these poems: women who dare to travel without maps or even "a single sign," women who dare the seduction of cliff edge leaps into deadly waters, women who dare the midnight garden to ensure their crop. When Cecelia Frey considers the pain recklessness causes to others, she returns to the source that impels a rec …

Michael Smith burst into public view in 1993 as the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of site-directed mutagenesis, the process by which genes can be changed under laboratory conditions for medical and research purposes. Smith became a local hero not only because of the honour and prestige represented by the award but a …

Harold Rhenisch's first artistic love was the theatre. Twenty-eight years after first playing Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he brings Shakespeare alive for us in this sparkling and inventive work fusing drama, poetry and consummate clowning. These poems are onstage, under the lights, dressed in greasepaint and tights. Some of them are vaudevil …

Drawing on his experience as a two-term MP and former Parliamentary Secretary, Ted McWhinney addresses the need for modernization to meet the radically new demands of the plural, multicultural Canada of the 21st century and offers new ways out of our present constitutional straight-jacket. Among the key contemporary topics discussed are the atrophy …

This compelling biography of Doug Hepburn, the weightlifter who won gold for Canada in Stockholm in 1953 and at the British Empire Games in Vancouver in 1954, delivers fascinating, first-hand information about an unusual Vancouver athlete and the sporting world of the 1950s and 1960s. In this plain-spoken and moving biography of a strength legend, …

One of the greatest mad, sad literary love affairs of the twentieth century was that between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In her collection of poems, Hurdle adapts her own research on their lives to explore the love and loss in this relationship of poetic collaboration and rivalry, which lasts, in Hurdle's recreation, even after Plath's suici …

Canada's foremost literary critic looks at the politics of irony in modern writing and explains how it relates to imperial history, how it impacts upon personal memories, how it speaks from the margin, and how it indirectly teaches us to resist presumptuous authority. Funny, informed and emotionally engaging, Grandchild of Empire, an extension of t …

In this historical novel, Susan Dobbie takes us inside the world of Kimo Kanui, a young Kanaka man who leaves his native Hawaii in the early nineteenth century at a time when thousands of his people were leaving to find work abroad. Dobbie portrays Kimo signing on with the Hudson's Bay Company and being sent as a labourer to Fort Langley on the ban …

Adultery with its pleasure, pain and outrage! No one writes the poetry of adultery as does Nancy Holmes. For her guide, she takes the poet Ovid who schools her in his tender cynicism and teaches her the art of love.

Laura Lush's new collection of poems is nature poetry at its strongest and most insightful, the images connecting to give voice to our many uncertainties as we creep further into an already darkening twenty-first century. With an unwavering eye, Lush focuses on the spiritual tenacity needed to make our way through difficult times. Lush's sharply dr …

In these elegiac poems, George Payerle registers the experience of life continuing after the death of his closest friend, the BC poet and historian Charles "Red" Lillard. The poems describe their last trip together to the dry landscape of Central Oregon, circle to Alberta and then turn home to the wetscape of the Shadow Weather Coast.

Throughout are …

The Tenth Pupil, for readers eight to fourteen, is set in a small logging camp on Vancouver Island in 1934. Eleven-year-old Trudy Paige enjoys her life in Mellor's Camp. She has a loving family, a shaggy dog, friends, a swimming hole, a fishing stream, books to read, wild animals to lend a touch of danger, and a friend in Vancouver to visit. She es …

Connie Fife is one of Canada's warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as a …

Zoë Landale's new collection of poetry is remarkable for its fusion of rocky hardness with the luminosity of coastal British Columbia. As a poet, Landale has the lyric ability to evoke the particular with such warmth and grace that one cannot help becoming aware of a spiritual dimension.

Browsing in his grandfather's study, young Jamie discovers a notebook entitled "This Was My War" and finds himself pulled into the life of East End London teenagers whose adolescent years were overtaken by the devastation of World War II. As Jamie follows his grandfather's story in which "war" changes from silver screen exploits to bombs exploding …

Ronsdale Press offers a new edition of Steveston, this much loved work by two of Canada's finest poets and photographers. For this edition, Daphne Marlatt has written a new poem, never before published, to offer a postscript from 2001 on the original 1974 undertaking. At the publisher's request, Robert Minden has returned to his photographic archiv …

Connie Fife is one of Canada’s warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as …

Each year the League of Canadian Poets sponsors the prestigious National Poetry Contest. From the thousands of entries received, the judges choose three prize winners and a list of honourable mentions. These poems, the finest of the year, are then published in Vintage, the annual anthology.

For the year 2000, First-Prize Winner ($1,000) is Russell T …

The poems in Ghost Children explore the spiritual and psychological losses suffered by child survivors of the Holocaust. The title points both to the one and a half million children murdered in the Holocaust and to the many child survivors who have lived out their lives as "ghosts," never managing to allow their childhood self to surface in their a …

In this collection of poems, Kevin Roberts recreates his recent experience with cancer (non-Hodgkins Lymphoma), a cancer that is often fatal. Roberts takes us from the early feelings of denial through the doctor's fateful moment of diagnosis, onto his three years of treatment with chemotherapy and radiation, and finally into remission from the dise …

In her University of BC Sedgewick Lecture for 1999, Sandra Djwa relates the life and times of two illustrious professors of English, who were among the most influential teachers in Canada's history. From the 1920s to the 1970s, Garnett Sedgewick and Roy Daniells shaped the way tens of thousands of students experienced literature.

Sedgewick, the firs …

Each year the League of Canadian Poets sponsors the prestigious National Poetry Contest. From the thousands of entries received, the judges choose three prize winners and a list of honourable mentions. The annual anthology publishes the finest poetry of the year.

First prize winner is Susan M. Stenson of Victoria, BC, for her poem "When You Say Infi …

For thousands of years the image of the Green Man - foliage sprouting from his mouth to symbolize humanity's unity with the natural world - has survived in European civilization. Invoking this spirit, John Donlan counsels: "Wear the earth as if it were your skin." He writes of how "the wind's voice, translated through the low/hiss of pine needles, …

In this lavishly produced volume, Joseph Plaskett has created a prose "life in art" as colourful and vital as his finest paintings. He begins with his early life in New Westminster, BC, at a time when there were no private galleries.

Lawren Harris and Jock Macdonald were among his early mentors, and they helped him to win the first Emily Carr schola …

Yong-un Han (1879-1944) is recognized as Korea's finest Buddhist poet of the twentieth century and also one of the country's most influential political activists in the struggle against Japanese imperialism. Yong-un Han's Buddhist insights and political passion combine to give his poetry great spiritual power. He describes the complexities of love …

Using language as exorcism and photographs as a mirror of the shifting unconscious, Florence Treadwell crosses oceans both literal and emotional in Cleaving, her first book of poems. Memories of an elusive father shadow the unfolding love story, haunting the narrator who confuses childhood and adult passion and endows both father and lover with mag …