Labyrinth of Green is a collection of poetry and photography by Diana Hayes. Her poems and photographs share maps and narratives for the inner journey, a labyrinth that leads to wholeness, to our centre and back again out into the world. Here, both beauty and the forces of nature are revealed in delight, in grief, and ultimately through awakening. Each of the book’s five sections explores aspects of this process. The reader enters a West Coast rainforest and walks toward the inner sanctum of the wetlands. Childhood and adolescence and the lessons of the underworld will be encountered. Ancestors provide solace and wisdom. The well of grief is visited. Dreamscapes of near-sleep, offering healing — as a witness, as a seer, as sage — conclude the final section,“where sleep’s wild embrace does not prepare you.”

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DIANA HAYES was born in 1955 in Toronto and has lived on both coasts of Canada. She studied at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria, receiving a BA and an MFA in Creative Writing. She has six published books, her most recent being This is the Moon’s Work: New and Selected Poems. Her narrative photography has been featured in galleries in coastal B.C. and commissioned for book covers. Her practice of year-round ocean swimming inspired the formation of the Salt Spring Seals in 2002. She lives on Salt Spring Island, home since 1981, with her husband Peter, ginger cat, and myriad water birds and raptors on five forested acres near Little Stevens Lake.

“An elegant book, through and through. The poems tell us we are home, and about the hungry world beyond, in all its guises. I feel the caress of detail take root in me and grow, like tiny nameless flowers in a whirlwind of snow geese on a bright fall day.”
— Susan Musgrave, author of over 30 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, children’s literature, and most recently Origami Dove

“Every page in this book has such beauty, its place in the green labyrinth.”
— Theresa Kishkan, author of 16 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including Euclid’s Orchard

“Her photography is just as exquisite as her poetry.”
— Birgit Freybe Bateman, photographer, creator of Mindful Vision, an exhibition of photographs shown at the Stroganov Palace of the Russian Museum (2011)

“Dense complexity and simple beauties walk side by side through Diana Hayes’s poems and photographs — echoing, shadowing, and brightening a life’s adventures. Labyrinth of Green is a collection of images and words that is deep, lyric, and constantly rewarding.”
— Brian Brett, author of 13 books in three genres, including Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life