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 …

Margaret Thompson offers a powerfully moving and historically accurate account of life in Fort St. James, in northern British Columbia, in the 1820s. Through the character of Peter, a young boy who is orphaned at the Fort, Thompson presents a vivid picture of the difficult life for both the fur traders and the Natives in what was then called the "S …

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 …

In this lavishly produced hardcover volume, Plaskett has created an autobiography as colourful as his finest paintings. Plaskett begins with his early family life in New Westminster, BC, relates his encounter with abstract expressionism under Hans Hofmann, and then discusses the development of his mature style. Included are an introduction by the l …

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, …

As an innovative chronicler of the "little people" of Quebec, Michel Tremblay has no peer. Yet few Anglophone readers realize that Tremblay began as a writer of works of fantasy. Now, however, Michael Bullock, who won the Canada Council translation award for his translation of Tremblay's first collection of stories - Contes pour buveurs attardés ( …

Lynne Fairbridge's Tangled in Time presents a captivating story of a young girl's travel in time back to the harsh life of the Depression years. The novel opens in Edmonton with Janna's world being turned upside down when her mother tells her that she plans to remarry. Withdrawing from her family and feeling as though her father's memory has been b …

In this lucid yet impassioned book Clarence Bolt reveals how Canada is rapidly losing its sovereign status to the liberal, globalizing drive that has, since Confederation, endeavoured to eliminate regional diversity, self-reliance and distinctiveness by blending our regions into a centralized economic and political system. Echoing George Grant, Bol …

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 …

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 …

Known internationally as an award-winning Québecois novelist, Marie-Claire Blais has remained hidden as a dramatist from Anglophone readers. Nigel Spencer's first-ever translation recreates Blais' disturbing yet lyrical dramas, evoking a world of "winter sleep," while in the new millennium people prepare to put on new costumes, take on new roles.

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 …

Janice MacDonald's profusely illustrated chapter book tells the story of a most unusual Hallowe'en. Featured are Annalise the Witch, Ernie the Ghost and Milton the Skeleton - who live in their haunted house. When the three friends decide to make costumes and join the trick-or-treaters on the darkened streets in search of fun, excitement and treats, …

In Pnina Granirer: Portrait of an Artist Ted Lindberg captures the development in life and art of one of Canada's finest painters. Over the past forty years Pnina Granirer has been exploring and extending her perception of the world around us with exuberantly colourful and formally innovative paintings and prints.

Lindberg analyzes in detail Granire …

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 …

"Wuzz is a place not far from here. It's like here. Almost." Thus begins Willobe of Wuzz, the coming-of-age story of a dragon like no other-a dragon who uses his fire power to bake rather than burn, and who'd rather paint pictures than fight with knights. When Willobe wins the friendship of Princess Emily the Resourceful, a major flare-up with his …

A decade in the making, Jaihiun Kim's Modern Korean Verse in Sijo Form offers what will be the twentieth century's definitive collection of sijo. Kim begins with the work of Nam-son Ch'oe in the early 20th century and brings the collection up to date with recent poems from Chi-yob Yi and P'il-gon Kim.

Similar to the Japanese haiku in its brevity and …

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 …

For more the 200 years, controversy has simmered over the subject of cannibalism on the Pacific Northwest Coast. So heated has the topic become that many scholars have hesitated to engage in the debate. Now, using an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach, historian Jim McDowell offers a comprehensive study of cannibalism on the coast. Beginnin …

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 …

The second volume of Gordon Davies' collection of stories features the rivers of British Columbia and the Yukon. Travelling from the turbulent Yukon in the far north to the streams flowing into Washington State, Davies acts as a guide to fisher and non-fisher alike.

The avid fisherman will find information about the types of fish in each river as we …

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 …

In A Civilized Revolution, Gordon Wilson outlines, clearly and trenchantly, the changes necessary if British Columbia is to prosper in the 21st century. Central to Wilson's vision is a new approach to the management of our natural resources that keeps wealth within our province by directing the bounty of our forests, farms, mines and ocean to local …

In this delightful collection of animal fables, Robin Skelton transports young readers back to long long ago - an ancient and fabulous time. These humorous stories offer solutions to such difficult questions as "Why does the ostrich bury its head in the ground?" and "Why does the rabbit have no voice?" These are stories that will take children into …

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 …

Summertime, and moving time. A bittersweet time for "Lots of Boxes." But as he pragmatically tells his mother, all their belongings will fit inside his box collection, and the moving will be easy. The hard part will be to see if the new house with three apple trees will be a home like the old house with twin plum trees.

Over 10 Mondays, "Lots of Box …

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 …

A comprehensive account of Clayoquot Sound and the protest movement: rainforest ecosystems; the April 1993 land-use decision; co-opted forestry science; the Peace Camp and the Blockades; civil disobedience; the police, the courts and the corporations; environmental rights; ongoing logging violations in 1994 (with photos).

Six of BC’s foremost envi …

In a warm-hearted novel with over 40 illustrations, Linda Rogers and Rick Van Krugel have created a magical children's book that will appeal especially to young readers aged 6 to 13. The story tells of Jen and Odie who discover that their First Nations friend Frankie Zapper possesses magic, shamanistic powers. When their teacher, Mr. Smith, hurts O …

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 …