“... without a doubt the greatest poet English Canada has ever produced.”

—Dennis Lee

“A hundred years from now, one of the few Canadian poets whose work will still be read will be Al Purdy.”

—Maclean’s

Al Purdy (1918–2000), known as Canada’s unofficial poet laureate, wrote poetry that anyone could read. Having come from working-class …

The poems in The Broken Face explore a sacramental, imaginative vision within contexts of crime, perception, memory and love. In this collection, Russell Thornton returns to the vital themes of intimacy and family, loss, fear and hope, bringing to each poem the essential quality of a myth or incantation. Reverent and revealing, within those familia …

The title poem in David Zieroth’s the bridge from day to night follows the speaker across the Second Narrows Bridge to North Vancouver, a well-worn moment in a daily commute that opens a window into the sublime: “from the apex / of the bridge with traffic flying / I look directly into / their deepest clefts.” Such moments occur throughout the …

In response to her brother's sudden death, Cornelia Hoogland explores the shift in gravity his dramatic absence creates. Set on the Salish Sea on Vancouver Island's east coast, Trailer Park Elegy reaches back two thousand years to the First Peoples, as well as to the brother whose delight was summers spent at Deep Bay.

Hoogland looks to her child- …

The children of the Tsimshian village of Kitkatla love to play at being hunters, eager for their turn to join the grown-ups. But when they capture and mistreat a crow, the Chief of the Heavens, angered at their disrespect, brings down a powerful storm.

The rain floods the Earth and villagers have no choice but to abandon their homes and flee to the …

Forecast recovers early out-of-print work by Governor General's Award-winning poet John Pass. The poems engage potentialities--travel, an orchard he cares for, evolving relationships, house-building, becoming a poet and husband and father. They're grounded in place and time, but attuned, as he says, to constancy. Those for his young sons are poigna …

The fourth collection from award-winning poet Rachel Rose, Marry & Burn is a journey through a troubled relationship and a troubled city, charting the territory of love and addiction, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Inspired by struggles both personal and global, these are not gentle poems--they probe deep into comforting persona …

Norval Morrisseau's revered work has been honoured, copied and recognized throughout the art world and beyond. Less widely known but equally captivating is the artist's personal life story, which poet and biographer Armand Garnet Ruffo related in his powerful narrative biography, Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird (Douglas & McIntyre, …

Orca Chief is the third in a series of Northwest Coast legends by Roy Henry Vickers and Robert Budd. Their previous collaborations, Raven Brings the Light (2013) and Cloudwalker (2014), are award-winning national bestsellers.

Thousands of years ago in the village of Kitkatla, four hunters leave home in the spring to harvest seaweed and sockeye. Whe …

In British Columbia, like most of the world, the wealth of the richest one percent has grown exponentially in recent decades, while the majority have found their incomes stagnant or even declining. The top 10 percent in BC now hold 56.2 percent of the wealth, a greater share than anywhere else in Canada. Our richest have wealth counted in the billi …

David Zieroth's Albrecht Dürer and me, an autobiographical travelogue spanning the author's journeys through central Europe, explores the transformative effect of dislocation. Inspired by and responding to art and music, history and war, architecture and place, this collection unearths knowledge that can only be realized by leaving home.

Throughout …

Tell me, how do I write better poetry? You can't? I'm not surprised. You can write it yourself but damned if you can tell someone else how, your classes to the contrary.
—Al Purdy

The truth is none of us who write poetry should allow ourselves to make public critiques of the others, not in a small country like this where we know each other too we …

From the author of The Boreal Gourmet comes another irresistible tribute to foods of the North, and this time she devotes special attention to feasts. Michele Genest’s feasts cover the whole spectrum—for small groups or large, extensively planned or spontaneous, as elaborate as a 12-course tasting menu or as simple and satisfying as a pot of L …

Roy Henry Vickers is known around the world for his unique artistic style marked by clean lines, vivid colours and natural themes drawn from the rugged beauty of the west coast of British Columbia. Influenced by his Tsimshian, Haida, Heiltsuk and British heritage, Vickers unites the stylized forms of his aboriginal ancestry with the realism of Euro …

Diane Tucker's Bonsai Love is an eloquent book of poems about the sensual delicacy of love. Carefully pruned, intricate in design, and sensitive to intrusion, these poems create an image of intimacy through reflection and in relation to nature, the universe, music, literature and art.

The voice that comes forth is one of self-doubt seeking reassura …

The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt.
The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life
in a prison yard. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught
trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives
and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild
baby fish run, they run the gauntlet of penned fish. They are eaten al …

In her bestselling book The Zero-Mile Diet (Harbour, 2010), gardening activist Carolyn Herriot inspired readers to put organic homegrown fruits and vegetables on the table, using time-saving, economical and sustainable methods.

Now Herriot is back with even more ideas to cook up fresh food from the garden throughout the year. The Zero-Mile Diet Cook …

Salt Spring, Pender, Galiano, Mayne and Saturna are the best known of the Southern Gulf Islands. Their residents value a rich food and drink heritage, and experiment busily with new foods and approaches to improve diversity and flavour, and support special diets and local sustainability. They celebrate slow foods--and slow islands; and many embrace …

Christine Allen and Michael Kluckner's portrayal of life on Killara Farm moves thoughtfully through a year of gardening with a rich, detailed narrative that evokes the many pleasures of life in rural Southwestern BC.

Allen, a master gardener, is also a lyrical writer, expressing the tiny details of life on the farm--the "winter jasmine, doggedly flo …

Song and Spectacle, the third collection by award-winning poet Rachel Rose, is composed of fierce hymns to the particular and universal struggles of birth, passion and loss, and the paradoxical quest for non-attachment in a treacherous, unpredictable and yet deeply beloved world.

Rose delves into the world of myth, using the stories of Daphne and Pe …

Tom Wayman's newest collection of poems, Dirty Snow, unflinchingly considers the impact of the Afghan War: its absence and presence in Canadians' everyday lives as citizens of a nation at war.

The collection explores Wayman's view that Canada's military intervention in a civil war between two odious sets of combatants has degraded Canadians' quality …

This volume represents the accumulated richness of fifty years' work by one of Canada's most important poets, Patrick Lane. Here, the reader can see how he developed from an engaged recorder of hard experience—even traumatic violence—into a master poet whose meditations on nature, human frailty, and love allow him to balance the world's sufferi …

The poems in crawlspace, John Pass's first volume of poetry since he won the Governor General's Literary Award in 2006, work within the narrowing passages imposed upon us by the inevitable strictures and limitations of living and experience: aging, love and loss, tightening or unraveling family ties. Close to home as always, in one instance literal …

One of Chris Czajkowski's first priorities when she arrived at Nuk Tessli, a remote location in BC's Coast Mountains, was to devise a way to bake bread. At first, she lived in a tent and her oven was a simple pile of rocks with a hole in the middle. But as she built her wilderness cabins and started providing for the clients of her wilderness adven …

Patrick Lane is one of Canada's pre-eminent poets, winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and three National Magazine Awards. His distinguished career spans forty-five years and twenty-four volumes of poetry as well …

"Bring me moose meat! You will not be sorry!" So says Whitehorse author and cook Michele Genest to the hunters in her circle. Wild is wonderful when it comes to Genest's creative treatments for northern viands, with exciting ideas such as moose cooked in Yukon-brewed espresso stout and finished with chocolate, lime and cilantro, Arctic char marinat …

The mystical shores of coastal British Columbia hold boundless inspiration and an enigmatic spiritual presence for many who live along its various coves and inlets. For almost three decades, Carol Evans has been practicing and refining her art,creating stunning portrayals of the beautiful and rugged shores of Vancouver Island and the coastal mainla …

Selected for Poetry in Transit 2009

The Fly in Autumn is a nuanced work with an absurdist twist in which recognizable landscapes--of North Vancouver quays and piers and harbour fog--are sometimes irrevocably altered by "water-light" into places of the mind alive with "the hundred thousand thoughts everyone collects in a day." Risking unease, using l …

Shortlisted for the 2008 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry
Longlisted for the 2007 Victoria Butler Book Prize

Last Water Song, the first collection of new poetry from award-winning poet Patrick Lane since Go Leaving Strange (Harbour, 2004), is divided into two parts. The first part is a series of 16 long elegies on writer acquaintances who hav …

Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award for Poetry

High Speed Through Shoaling Water incorporates the beauty of the rural landscape with the strangeness of living in today's world. These deceptively simple poems cover rural life, social issues, love's vicissitudes, aging and the writing life. Throughout the book,
Wayman interweaves reflections on the la …

Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award for Poetry

Earth's Crude Gravities is both a meditation and an argument, a compelling series of poems on the world of matter and the world of spirit. Acclaimed poet Patrick Friesen muses on the religion that has been such a key part of his own background--but he also raises uncertainties.

Whether he is discussing h …

Earle Birney (1904-1995), the father of modern Canadian poetry, was one of Canada's finest writers and the author of "David," arguably the most popular Canadian poem of all time. One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems features Birney's best work, spanning his entire writing career from 1926 to 1987.

Born in Calgary, Birney grew up in different parts of Alb …

The Human Shore is an accomplished collection of poems both grittily real and spiritual, the follow-up to Russell Thornton's critically acclaimed House Built of Rain. Whether describing a tidal wave, a train yard, or the ravaging effects of a wildfire, Thornton's work is arresting and masterful. The poet covers a wide variety of places and subjects …

In this masterful work by award-winning poet David Zieroth, a man opens his apartment door to find a younger version of himself. The boy becomes his guide on a profound journey from 21st-century urban Vancouver to the 1950s Canadian prairies and back again. Along the way, time slides magically back and forth between the speaker's contemporary exist …

Ecologue is the culmination of Ken Belford's lifelong quest to reconcile land and language, innovation/development and earth's geographical history, nature and humankind's place within it. He extends this deep contemplation to the relationship between poem and reader, deftly shaping his lines into a pure expression of where "ritual and mystery loit …

In this fascinating and funny collection of correspondence, Canada's greatest poet lets it all hang out in spirited private exchanges with Pierre Trudeau, Carol Shields, Earle Birney, Anna Porter, Charles Bukowski, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Jack McClelland, Northrup Frye, William Golding, Darryl Sittle …

"Finding the right words for this place that has become home." That's the challenge identified by the Yukon's pre-eminent poet in this accomplished new collection. In the opening essay, Friis-Baastad describes his arrival in the Yukon as a 23-year-old fresh from Toronto, and his search for contemporary ways to evoke a landscape already mythologize …

Go Leaving Strange - the latest collection from award-winning poet Patrick Lane - is filled with poems that explore the darker side of human consciousness and desire. A man kills his own six-year-old child in "Weeds." An addict strives to keep ahead of death in "Smack." But amid this bleak landscape of pity and regret, there is also redemption and …

Thirty-five years after the publication of his first book, Peter Trower has brought together his finest poems for the beautiful, thorough and definitive volume Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys.

From whistle punk to smelter worker to faller to crane operator, Trower worked up and down the West Coast for 22 years collecting the stories and soaking in …

Russell Thornton has the rare ability to be both keenly observant of the minute details of his environment and intensely introspective. His poetry is full of startling images that will stay with you long after turning the final page.

In House Built of Rain, Thornton takes his readers on a dizzying journey of human experience - from the yearning of a …

The Breath You Take From The Lord is a masterful volume that confirms Patrick Friesen's reputation as one of Canada's finest and most versatile poets. In language striking in its simplicity and strength, Friesen's work moves with the controlled intensity of a hawk circling in a vast prairie sky.

These are poems infused with a sense of reverie and i …

For almost thirty years, poet Tom Wayman has celebrated the language of everyday life and work. Praised for his wit, sensuality and conversational style, Wayman can weave the mundane with the mysterious and shed new light on both.

In his latest collection, My Father's Cup, Wayman examines the conflicting emotions that arise when a parent dies, when …

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 …

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 …

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' …

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 …

"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 …