Glacial Erratics
Your Nickel's Worth Publishing / 24 January 2013

Glacial Erratics by Peter Sarsfield and Kim Mann Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Sandy Bonny $ 19.95 ISBN 378-1-894431-72-9 A current of migration compels this partnership of poems and pictures from writer Peter Sarsfield and photographer Kim Mann — the book captures animals in movement, seasons in change, and landscapes etched by shadows that, with the lift of a page, allude to lengthening and contraction. Between photographs, poetic offerings travel between the Canadian North and southern prairies, tracing avenues of time and maturity, circling anchor-stones of hope and regret. The collection’s title, ‘Glacial Erratics’, refers to boulders deposited by the ice sheets that once covered our prairie landscape. These provide evidence of our geographical heritage, offering themselves as touchstones to a history of dramatic change. And yet they are accidental legacies, monuments borne of glacial fatigue, of failure and release. These poems echo their title. Read separately, it would be difficult to thread them to a theme. But linked and grounded by Mann’s photographs, they plot a journey. A raft of incidents, a life’s hopes and lessons. There is a risk in this trust of fate to organize the poems, which Sarsfield alludes to in ‘message found’:…