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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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.

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 …