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 gardens becomes a backdrop for a lovesick woman waiting on a veranda for the postman to bring her relief "in the last era before e-mail, in the last era before high tech gives short shrift to longing." Other poems shine out of more fleeting events, each poem radiating with the emotional intensity of its moment.

Elisabeth Harvor (1936), recipient of the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in Literary Arts )2000), grew up in the Kennebecasis Valley, NB. Let Me be the One (1996), one of three collections of stories, was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction. Her first collection of poetry, Fortress of Chairs (1992), won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and she has won First Prize in the League of Canadian Poets' National Poetry Competition and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. Harvor has published a novel, Excessive Joy Injures The Heart (2002).

Elisabeth Harvor's profile page