An Orange from Portugal
It’s often said that the main export of the Maritimes is Maritimers, and the same is true of Newfoundland. “Going down the road” is a way of life, but so is coming home for Christmas. It is tradition marked by happiness, fun, and sometimes less comfortable emotions. Given the regional penchant for yarn spinning, this common experience yields …
Coastlines
Atlantic Canada is enjoying a renaissance unknown since the days of Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn, and John Thompson. Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada features work by 60 of the region’s finest poets in a volume that will whet appetites for more. The earlier poetry renaissance began in 1945, with the establishment of The Fiddlehead magazine …
Excessive Joy Injures The Heart
When she begins to have trouble sleeping, Claire Vornoff drives out into the country to become a client of Declan Farrell, and an education (of sorts) begins. An alternative practitioner and an iconoclast in the medical establishment, Farrell is magnetic, unsettling, and Claire is both beguiled and skeptical as she tries to resist his ability to ge …
Fortress of Chairs, A
Astonishing poetry that moves between conversational simplicity and dense metaphor by the author of the story collections If Only We Could Drive Like This Forever (Penguin) and Our Lady of All the Distances (HarperCollins). Readers who know Elisabeth Harvor as an accomplished writer of fiction will experience the thrill of discovery with The Fortre …
Let Me be the One
Intimate and unforgettable, these eight stories play with themes of great emotional intensity: infatuation, tenderness, resentment, hope. The perceptive gallantry of a man in his early twenties leads an older woman to fall more than a little in love with him. While interviewing a woman painter who boasts about her sexual conquests, a journalist pic …
Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring, The
Both pastoral and medical elements play with themes of great emotional intensity in these innovative poems about infatuation, pottery-making, resentment, memory loss, illness, jealousy, and love. At long last a second poetry collection to follow the success of Fortress of Chairs.
Open Door in the Landscape, An
In Elisabeth Harvor's poetry collection An Open Door in the Landscape, the real and the surreal exist side by side. Doors open on snow, war, influenza, summer and winter oceans, the efficiency of obsession, and men who can dance. In yet another world, on a hot city morning in our most recent century, the tiny industrial screech of insects in August …
Room at the Heart of Things, A
A lively, quirky collection of short stories, poetry, and memoir vignettes from published (Nino Ricci, Robyn Sarah, Rhea Tregebov) and unpublished writers Harvor has met over the years in workshops and as a writer-in-residence in universities and libraries across Canada. Work that has nerve and verve and is close to the bone: this is what I've look …
