An award-winning poet’s day-book of poems, where both bounty and loss are tenderly assigned value.

Marlene Cookshaw, in her first collection of poetry in more than a decade, invites her readers to partake in a long-anticipated harvest that comes in many forms. Whether she’s haying June-high grasses, relishing a neighbour’s gift of new potatoes with her husband, logging fragments of poetry she’s read in a notebook, or honouring the deaths of her parents, Cookshaw works an open field. Through this pastorale wander dogs, horses, chickens, and donkeys in counterpoint to farm labourers and long-time residents who share in her abiding connection to the land they mutually watch over and tend. The power grid may fail while every monthly expense is brought to account, but observation as careful and particular as Cookshaw’s more than weighs the seasons that it seeks to bring into balance. Each day I plan how the next will differ,

will more resemble what I want a life to be.

“These poems can confront quotidian life in plainspoken language because, like an extraordinary pencil drawing, there is so much subtle cross-hatching and shading. Cookshaw observes her mother’s death, for example, both directly and aslant, half turning away, as if unsure which is the more truthful. Mowing requires that you sit and visit for a good long while.” —Ross Leckie

Born and raised in south Alberta, Marlene Cookshaw now lives on Pender Island and in Victoria, B.C. Since receiving her BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria in 1984, she has taught at the Victoria School of Writing and served on juries for various writing awards, including the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry, the Archibald Lampman Award, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, BC Festival of the Arts literary scholarships, and the BC Arts Council and provincial scholarships. She has been associated with the quarterly literary journal Malahat Review since 1985 and was its editor until 2004. Shameless (2002) was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Lunar Drift (2006) is a chronology of poems that ostensibly marches through time, from 4241 BC, the first numbered date in human history, to a hotel tryst in Room 39. Cookshaw has received the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry and the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize.

Marlene Cookshaw's profile page

How do we find a place, our own place, in the world? And once found, as Marlene Cookshaw asks, “How far from centre will stability extend?” Here is a clear view and a welcome reminder of the preciousness of the ground we stand on, the “thin shell” of the egg that holds us.

Kate Braid