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Poetry Canadian

Cracking Apricot Pits to Flavour the Heart

by (author) Heather MacLoud

Publisher
Mansfield Press
Initial publish date
May 2023
Category
Canadian, Native American, Indigenous
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771262859
    Publish Date
    May 2023
    List Price
    $18.00

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Description

Heather Simeney MacLeod's latest collection of poetry takes hold of memories, ancestors, family, and kin amid years spent in Canada's western provinces and northern territories, as well as Scotland's Shetland Isles and Highlands. Amidst the Michif Nation that is her heritage, MacLeod navigates the silt bluffs, watersheds, and archipelagos from Canada's north to Scotland's that inform a sinuous spill to her verse. MacLeod writes of the arctic, the interior of BC, the plains of the prairies, the inlets and deltas making of geography a rhythm and roll of memory. MacLeod's poetry is pulled by the coursing of generations and characterized by narratives and a compelling lyric intensity. These poems share a charged tone and agile focus upon the concentrated territory of memory, time, and death. "I was born into a world, like all the others/ filled with killing and chaos, burning and rain,/ grace and beauty. And, I can still take a deep breath./ I am still breathing," MacLeod writes, and Cracking Apricot Pits to Flavour the Heart is an attempt to reveal the dense evocativeness of that world.

About the author

Heather Simeney MacLeod is a citizen of the Métis Nation. She's published four collections of poetry--My Flesh the Sound of Rain (Coteau Books), The Burden of Snow(Turnstone Press), Intermission (J. Shillingford Press), The Little Yellow House (McGill). Heather's first poetry book, My Flesh the Sound of Rain was nominated for the First Nations Publishing Award. Smoking Lung Press published a chapbook, Shapes of Orion. Heather's poetry, short fiction, and essays have appeared in most major national literary journals as well as appearing in continental and international magazines. Heather's plays have received two honourable mentions in the Alaska Native's Playwright competition as well as in the publication Aboriginal Voices. Her creative nonfiction has been long-listed in CBC's literary competition on more than one occasion. She's lived throughout western and northern Canada, received her BA from the University of Victoria, her Master in Social Sciences from the University of Edinburgh, and her PhD in English and Film Studies from the University of Alberta. She works as an Assistant Teaching Professor and lives with her family in Kamloops, BC.

Heather MacLoud's profile page

Excerpt: Cracking Apricot Pits to Flavour the Heart (by (author) Heather MacLoud)

E P I L O G U E

I, too, carry the bodies of the dead. I carry them
from war-torn landscapes marred by gunfire and grenades. I carry them through the summits along the Coquihalla through to the Nicola Valley. I carry my dead.
I carry my step-father's body, and the memories
of his alcoholism, schizophrenia, and suicide.
I carry my Carrier cousin alongside my nine-year-old brother a pallbearer at her funeral; I carry flowers
to her grave. I carry her memory with me
alongside the cancer that killed her. I carry the bodies
of the dead. I carry the stillborn girl-child.
I carry her, still, in my body more than memory.
I pull my grandfather's body in a Red River cart,
and the Métis cart sings--I would call it that--with every grinding turn of its wheels the endurance of grief.
I pull my niece's body out of Jamieson Creek.
I carry my father with me as intangible as a discussion
on DNA. A helix of coloured memory twisting
and turning. I carry a lock of my husband's hair
from the Thompson Rivers to the Water of Lieth.
I hold fine China tea cups out towards
my grandmother's dying turning the delicate
rendering of Birch trees this way then that.
I carry my Secwepemc cousin through the fields
of her people's memory, and their desecrated burial grounds. But I cannot carry my mother or my little boy.
My arms are too tired, now, and maybe too old.
I set them down reminding them that they are not a burden but memory that circles round me like a homing pigeon unable to land. I, too, carry the bodies of the dead.