First Mountain

First Mountain
by Paulette Dubé
published by Thistledown Press
review by Sharon Adam
$15.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-33-1

This volume of poetry is thin, but the contents are definitely not. Ms Dubé layers her writer’s voice with a variety of subjects, all of which populate her life in the mountains. Time and space revolve around images that are both familiar and spiritual. Her sharp observations and specific recollections engage the reader and encourage further exploration into this small but powerful time capsule.

The pattern of words that the author evokes rises from her experiences living in the foothills of Jasper, Alberta. They evoke feelings of peace and calm while triggering memories in our own lives. The poems are not titled, rather they are numbered like the pages of a diary, or journal. They meander throughout the landscape, bringing the life of the wilderness to the heart of the suburbanite. These reflections of time and place introduce a sense of calm and quiet the mind so that our inner voices can hear and respond to the rhythm and cadence of the poetry. She has pushed back the of wave of civilization with its tendency to erode our natural life experience.

The journal style is new and very reader friendly. The language Ms Dubé uses conjures sharp, clear images that reflect her emotions and transfer them to the reader. This is a wonderful addition to your library, one that you will return to again and again.

Ms. Dubé has written four books, including her novel Talon, which has won several awards. “First Mountain” was a CBC Literary Award winner in 2005. She lives and works in Jasper, Alberta.

This book is available in local bookstores or visit www.skbooks.com.

Published in:  on 30 July 2008 at 10:27 am Leave a Comment

Post

Post Cover“Post”
By Arley McNeney
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by M E Powell Mendenhall
$ 19.95 ISBN: 978-1-897235-28-7

The beauty and pain of the physical body becomes the focus of Arley McNeney’s first published novel, “Post.”

In this 469-page novel, Nolan Taylor, a Canadian women’s wheelchair basketball Olympic champion, searches for a new identity after hip-replacement surgery. The title has multiple meanings, referring to her position on the team as well as her post-operative angst: “I was an elite wheelchair basketball player. The centre for Team Canada. The Big Girl. The Post. Now, I am a… former elite wheelchair basketball player: the post-Post.”

She almost immediately becomes pregnant with would-be musician Quinn, her boyfriend of 13 years. The book begins just before the surgery and ends as the baby is born. In between, the story careens backward and forward between her childhood, her first affair with her basketball mentor Darren, her past and current life with Quinn, and her eventual re-involvement with Darren after she becomes pregnant.

McNeney’s words flow like music or poetry: “It was natural to see my hip as a bawdy house: skin like heavy curtains over the secret creaking of joints. My hip with its redlight- district throb of inflammation when I walk, heartbeat misplaced there. My heart not in the right place, too close to the groin.”

As a “big girl” on the Canadian women’s wheelchair basketball team, the New Westminster author knows the reality underlying the practice and competition scenes she writes, including the Olympic championships. When the book was published, she was still working on her graduate degree in creative writing at Champaign-Urbana Illinois.

Published in:  on 23 July 2008 at 1:12 pm Leave a Comment
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Svoboda


Svoboda
By Bill Stenson
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Chris Istace
$ 18.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-30-0

Svoboda, by Victoria, B.C. author Bill Stenson, is a story of assimilation, providing a strong overview of how one Doukhobor family came to be as Canadian as their neighbours. Vasili Saprikin grew up in the midst of the tumultuous early history of the Doukhobor’s struggle to maintain the way of life they wanted to bring to Canada from Russia. A communal people, their settlements in both Saskatchewan and British Columbia were being assaulted by governmental attempts to assimilate the Doukhobor people into the Canadian culture of the 1950s.

The Doukhobor’s response to this pressure developed into a pacifistic faction and a violent one. Learning from his grandfather, Alexay, Vasili stood outside these two factions while being taught to be proud of his heritage, regardless of how the circumstances of his culture changed. This was a challenge after the boy was whisked away from his single mother, Anuta, to residential school, where he was introduced to a conventional North American education and lifestyle.

Vasili came to enjoy being educated and living the life of a standard teenager, however negative his experience at the residential school was. After returning to his mother and grandfather, he continued his education and grew to be immersed in conventional Canadian culture. However, how would a Doukhobor boy growing into a man maintain his spiritual and cultural identity while living in this new place?

This is the story Stenson intends to reveal in Svoboda, and he does so with keen insight into what it may have been like to be persecuted as an outsider coming to Canada in the 1940s and 1950s. Although a fictional story, Stenson drives home the point that the Doukhobor story, while troubling at first, is a story that reveals the multi-layered fabric that makes up Canada.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR VISIT WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 17 July 2008 at 4:51 pm Leave a Comment
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Interwoven Wild


“Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden”
Written by Don Gayton
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$15.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-35-5

When one considers gardening books, “coffee table” books containing sumptuous photographs might spring to mind, but BC writer and nationally-known ecologist Don Gayton has written a gardening book of another nature, and for this gardener’s money, it’s far more satisfying than a full-colour, glossy album of gardens I could never aspire to.

Gayton’s book of intelligent, easy-to-read literary essays, “Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden” (Thistledown Press) delivers an ideal combination of history, witty personal anecdotes, and practical information. A vague through-line exists in the antics of Gayton’s dandelion-flinging dachshund, Spud, “who looks like an Irish setter might if it were left in the dryer too long.”

Gayton is a first-rate writer and an “every person’s” philosopher. He makes the biology of a compost bin sound like both poetry and stand-up comedy (“Nobody likes a monotonous diet, not even bacteria”). Of the “Split Eden” – our penchant for pairing the cultivated and the wild – he contends that this duality “courses well beyond yard and garden into our very understanding of nature.”

His subjects include soil quality (“To exceed ten percent organic matter … is to arrive at a highly evolved karmic state”, the pinnacle being soil that exhibits “the colour and texture of German chocolate cake”); the importance of honouring the “edge” in gardening (“Pathways, raised beds, rock walls and massed plantings … make for much more satisfactory treasure and Easter egg hunt terrain ..”); and his own struggles to build rock walls. He relays how “Plants and landscapes are a wonderful source of art inspiration” and contemplation, and his examples range from Monet to poet Patrick Lane.

From the chapter “Weeds ‘R’ Us”: “The dandelion is indeed a superstar, a role model that other weeds can look up to.” One of his numerous great tips is to control weeds by “beat[ing] them at their own game” and “plant[ing] something even more aggressive than the weed is …” Another gem concerns native plants, which “sleep in the first year, creep in the second year, leap in the third year.”

Much of that endearing trait – jolly self-deprecation – is present. Regarding plant identification, Gayton writes: “The way this process works in my own head reminds me of an elaborate nonsense machine, cobbled together from bicycle parts and inexpensive kitchen appliances … a lot of extraneous mental clanking and banging, and I believe a cuckoo clock is involved.”

Add paragraphs on the history of gardening, greenhouses, and landscape architecture; responses to the why of gardening (“views of lush vegetation can trigger a sense of ease and personal contentment …”); tree lore; yard art; the poetry of garden tools; plant sex; garden therapy; xeriscaping; and interwoven wisdom ” … we enter greenhouses not so much to know nature, but to know nature in order to better understand ourselves,” and you have the formula for a superb book.

“Interwoven Wild” is indeed “for everyone who sees deeper meanings in their gardens and landscapes.” Easy-to-read, yes. Easy-to-admire, even more so. This is full-colour.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 8 July 2008 at 4:30 pm Leave a Comment
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Wild Justice

Book TitleWild Justice
By Les Langager
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing
Reviewed by Tim Tokaryk
$19.95 ISBN 978-1-894431-11-8

Les Langager’s first book, “Wild Justice” betrays its prairie, western title with espionage and international intrigue. In a series of intertwining characters from Israel, Alberta, and Saskatchewan’s north, the patterns don’t seem clear at first. But as the tale unfolds the connections made in the past come back to haunt and bless us at the same time. For we know not what fate has in store for us until we see it for what it is.

Rookie Constable Al Stava, ex-hockey jock and all-round good guy, is fast tracked through the early part of RCMP career, with stalwart character and aptitude. His first major case, dealing with a vengeful psychotic who captures youthful news photographer Jill Monroe, ends with a shoot-’em-up chase across the prairies. The chance meeting would alter Stava’s life forever. Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away a plot is hatched to steal something more tangible, more dangerous from an inconspicuous northern prairie community, a place the Canadian government doesn’t want anyone to know about. And even in the apparent ghost town, it isn’t “[a]nother typical day at Canada’s secret military installation.”

Amazingly, all these stories verge on a single, potential catastrophic event that can turn civilization into barbaric stone-agers. Langager’s ability to hold the weave apart until the exact moment is excruciatingly rewarding. With a rich set up and quick dialogue, the weave captures how tied we are together, whether in a small community, or in countries around the world. “Wild Justice” is a surprise, right until the end.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR VISIT WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on at 1:14 pm Leave a Comment
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The Romance of Saskatchewan Settlements

“The Romance of Saskatchewan Settlements”
By Colin A. Thomson and Rodney G. Thomson
Published by THORO Publishing
Review by Chris Istace
Price $ 22.95 ISBN 0-9734313-0-X

There’s something quaint about the way communities are named in Saskatchewan. Whether the names honor heroes or villains – local or foreign – a geological feature, or a historic occurrence, each community and the stories behind their naming are a significant part of their histories. Their names say something about both the people who settled there and the generations that followed.

Colin A. Thomson and Rodney G. Thomson seek to establish how much of an influence the “people of the pen” – writers, poets, journalists, scientists, historians, composers, artists, and others – had on the people of Saskatchewan with “The Romance of Saskatchewan Settlements”. Working in the vein of Bill Barry’s “People Places,” the Thomsons outline the lives and times of the writers and artists who had their names etched on maps and highway signs throughout Saskatchewan.

The authors pay particular homage to the communities in the southeast area of the province, which they have labeled “Writer’s Corner”. This zone includes a box on the map that runs from Moose Jaw, south to the U.S. border, east to the Manitoba border, north to the Trans-Canada Highway and back to Moose Jaw. Many of the communities here are named after “people of the pen”, famous, infamous, and lesser known.

Written with the casual air found on coffee row in most of the towns and villages they highlight, “The Romance of Saskatchewan Settlements” profiles such luminaries as Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and Wolfgang Mozart; Canadians like John Dafoe and Robert Service, and less famous figures like James Isham and John Ridpath.

At 164 pages, the book is a quick escape for readers with a taste for history and biography. From the book-opening authors’ note that pays homage to the elevators that used to dominate the Prairie landscape, to the town by town profiles, the Thomsons use the book to carry on the heritage of both living and long-dead communities.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR VISIT WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 2 July 2008 at 3:52 pm Leave a Comment
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