This modern fantasy novel set in London - for children ages 8 to 12 - tells the story of Elizabeth, a twelve-year-old Canadian girl who feels homesick and lonely after her mother's death when her father moves them to London. Soon, however, she meets an assortment of unusual characters and a strange adventure unfolds. Among her new friends is Maud, …

In these Red Cross memoirs, some 30 women tell their stories of volunteer work with the Canadian Red Cross Corps in overseas postings during World War Two and the Korean War. These dramatic narratives take us across oceans infested with enemy submarines to witness Canadian women on duty in the U.K., in Europe and in Asia.

The volunteers shouldered c …

With the appearance of this English translation, Western readers will for the first time be able to appreciate the poetry of Korea's most revered and popular modern poet. Born at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sowol Kim was the first poet to introduce the Korean vernacular into poetry. His verse combines sharply edged, everyday phrasing wi …

William New has created a wondrously zany collection of rhyming verse, ranging from the playful to the mysterious. Included are percussive nonsense rhymes, puzzle poems, joyful dances with anagrams and gentle haiku. The poems are complemented by Vivian Bevis's full-page, full-colour illustrations, which capture the high-spirited and impetuous quali …

Mythic and colloquial, lyrical and elegant, Taking the Breath Away introduces us to Harold Rhenisch's mature poetic voice in poems characterized by brilliant imagery and continuous reinvention. Long known as the poet of the land, the poet who conjures the land to speak, Rhenisch in this new collection bridges a host of Western artforms - gothic, ba …

This collection of essays evolved from a colloquium held at the University of British Columbia in 1995 to honour the eminent political scientist and aphorist W.J. Stankiewicz. A theorist and consultant on political decisions, Stankiewicz has been noted for his ability to bring the classical concepts of political science into the decision-making roo …

Harold Enrico is a rare poet who combines the deepest traditions of our history, our spirituality, with the colourful imagery of the Pacific Northwest. He has been hailed as a major poetic voice by George Woodcock, praised by Theodore Roethke, and selected by Poetry Chicago and Choice magazine. A Second Earth contains the finest poems from his thre …

Set in the internment camps of the British Columbia interior during World War II, Terry Watada's Daruma Days captures the Japanese Canadian experience of imprisonment. Watada draws on the accounts of people who lived through the camps, often speaking with the voices of the issei and nisei, to portray the camps as haunted by demonic forces, the inha …

Hong Kong Poems is the first-ever collection of poems about Hong Kong in parallel English and Chinese texts. Appearing in the year when Hong Kong returns to Chinese sovereignty, this collection offers insights into what Hong Kong was and is on the edge of becoming. Parkin and Wong speak of the dynamism of Hong Kong, of a city where the present meet …

In this collection of poems written in English and French parallel versions, Inge Israel evokes the life and work of Russian-born painter Chaim Soutine. Living and starving alongside his artist friends Modigliani, Chagall, Lipschitz and others on the Left Bank in the 1920s, Soutine was acclaimed by them as the expressionist par excellence.

These poe …

The Derrick Humphreys Story is a superb biography, a life of adventure that begins in Dickensian England before World War I, then moves to the Western Australian mining frontier of the 1930s and '40s, with excursions into the New Guinea campaign in World War II, the De Beers' South African diamond empire, a foreign aid project in Brazil and the reb …

Marya Fiamengo is one of Canada's truly fine poets. For nearly four decades, she has been publishing poetry of unusual distinctiveness. Intelligent, richly evocative, formidable in its clarity, lyrical and yet austere, the voice in Fiamengo's poems is like no other in Canadian poetry.

White Linen Remembered, her seventh collection, expresses her con …

In this lively and informative book, Howard Richler imparts his fascination with the richness of the language which is fast becoming the globe's newest lingua franca. Filled with surprises about the language we use everyday, Take My Words offers information about the history of words, their shifting meanings, and the essential playfulness of langua …

Once again Linda Rogers and Rick Van Krugel have teamed up to create a zany adventure story. Molly Brown's mum is a clown, but Molly longs desperately for normalcy, including ordinary dinners and regular hours. And most of all, Molly longs for her vanished father.

Molly's frenetic search for her missing father draws her Chinese-Canadian friend Troup …

Benet Davetian's starkly moving stories portray individuals enmeshed in social and political upheavals not of their own choosing: an innocent Somali farmer struggles to survive famine and war; a Serb sniper faces a bizarre opportunity to redeem himself; a Rwandan Hutu is forced to choose between his own life and those of his Tutsi in-laws; and an i …

In celebration of his 70th birthday, Ronsdale Press is pleased to release Robin Skelton's The Edge of Time. In this new collection of poems, Skelton walks the edge, looking forwards and backwards. Meditating on roads taken and not taken, he employs his poetic gift to consider our relation to time: how we are both immersed in it, and yet able to ste …

Two Shores is the first collection of poetry in English by a Vietnamese immigrant to the West. Born in Hanoi in 1940 and then moving to Saigon in 1954, Thuong Vuong-Riddick first describes life in Vietnam under the influence of the Japanese, the Chinese, the Vietminh, the French, and the Americans, as well as the difficulties of living through "the …

In her third book, Zoë Landale explores the darkened rooms of family myth and history. Focusing on family members from the past - matrons, suicides and brilliant eccentrics - she investigates their lives and the shadowy but potent power they exert over the present.

These Canadian war bride stories recount one of the great untold epics of World War II. Approximately 48,000 British and European women married Canadian servicemen during the war and made the adventurous crossing from "blackouts to bright lights." In time for the 50th anniversary of the end of war, Barbara Ladouceur and Phyllis Spence interviewed o …

In these poems, Nicholas Catanoy recreates the diary that he kept as a young cadet in Romania when he was imprisoned by the invading Russians. Taken out three times to be executed, Catanoy was one of the few from among the 200 prisoners to survive the random executions. After being released, Catanoy recreated in this memoir the impact of being a pr …

As the title implies, Dementia Americana is about the craziness of America. In what he describes as "the most personal writing I have ever done," Keith Maillard meditates upon the implications for private life of the two most bizarre wars of our time: the Gulf War and the Vietnam War. Working within traditional closed forms, but stretching them to …

These poems employ the short lyric as it derives from the haiku tradition. Through progressions of image clusters, anne mckay captures states of experience that elude the conscious mind: "but young / was there / . . . and heat / hung with scarlet hurry / and gates forgotten / under sly and hunting moons / of summer hurting." A high point of the col …

Together and apart, the poet A. F. Moritz and the artist Ludwig Zeller enact the search for meaning within a shattered mechanical universe. The poem is present as well in a Spanish translation by Susana Wald, who has also conducted an interview with the poet and artist.

"Jonas has long been my favorite poet writing in English. . . . No one is better than George Jonas at taking the world around us in its populous dimensions and allowing its facets to reveal unknown lights." - J. Michael Yates

As a novelist, Jerry Newman has long enjoyed a distinguished reputation for his wide-ranging characterizations of individuals caught in social and political webs. Now in Sudden Proclamations, his first collection of poetry, Newman situates the reader within the shadowy, mind-lit inner world. Daring to show that human savagery knows no bottom line, …

In this rich collection of new poems, Inge Israel draws upon the many voices of her past - Russian, German, Danish, Irish, French and English - to open some of history's unmarked doors. Among her most powerful recreations is that of Nora Joyce, in a dramatic monologue that shows us her famous husband in a wholly new light.

This impressive collection of new poems shows us Skelton stepping out in a new direction. Moving easily between free verse and closed forms (villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, rondeaus, and even arcane Welsh forms), Skelton addresses family, friends and readers everywhere to create a poetry of presence, a communion through language, in the face of a d …

Fred Candelaria is the poet's poet. His language becomes pure music, taking the reader beyond the empirical world of represented objects into the "phenomenal."

In Learning to Breathe, Richard Stevenson wrestles the male muse; he acknowledges rape, emasculation, torture, and attempts to reconcile the lot of the sons of Cain to the roles of prodigal fathers. Each of the lyrics, serial narratives, and dramatic monologues asks the question: How can our children become fathers to the men we are now?

In her fourth volume of poetry, Inge Israel takes the reader on a journey deep into contemporary Japan. She depicts the conflict between the consumerism of industrial life and the luminosity of age-old ceremonies. In the end, the delicate, lyric qualities of Israel's poems re-establish the patterns of Zen.

Harold Enrico's third collection of poetry continues the tone and rhythm of the great European masters while employing the tough, strong imagery of the Pacific Northwest.

Fred Candelaria's sixth collection of poetry, Chinese Chamber Music evokes a world of tradition, art and great ceremony, a world that excites "blinded touch" and that leads readers "to read the unwritten." These poems present the world as music, not as problems to be solved. Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University, Candelaria founded and then …

This selected edition contains the strongest and most comprehensive collection of Lloyd Abbey's work to date. Writing frequently about animals and insects, Abbey takes us inside their consciousness, allowing us to see anew the world through their eyes. Author of the best-selling novel The Last Whales, Abbey is emerging as a major talent in Canadian …