Here we stand between one breath / and death asking to be light.

What happens when someone we love dies? Orchid Heart Elegies explores the fragmentation of loss.

In luminous poems that echo the Duino Elegies, Zoë Landale – like an edgy, modern-day Rilke – takes the reader to a place of amazement. Enquiring into loneliness and the transformative power of a particular bioregion, Landale’s poems use language infused with the consolations of music to enact transformation. Following in the tradition of thousands of years of lyrical poetry, they gently suggest that we can bear our lives, no matter the pain, by means of a sole moment’s solace.

Capturing the torn, jagged moments of grief and transforming them into poems of deep consolation and healing, Orchid Heart Elegies will appeal to any reader who has lost someone dear to them.

Born in Toronto, Zoe Landale went fishing at the age of 18 off the coast of BC, which she has been doing every year since. Now a veteran of 6 seasons, she admits to becoming cross when well-intentioned people ask if it is her first time out. Commercial fishing is not the easiest job, Zoe agrees, but says that she and her husband Conde work well together as a team. Zoe enjoys living on a boat and having the feeling that wherever you spend the night, you are spending it at home. And fishing? Sometimes I get tired of it and wish that we could be home in the summer, and I miss my cat and my garden, but then I look out at the clean grey sea, feel the cool breeze on my face and feel the boat heave under my feet.

Zoë Landale's profile page

“In a collection of astonishing poems, after Rilke's beautiful Duino Elegies, ten poems for survival of his annihilated soul, Landale advises us to invite emptiness. Her lifeline is the phenomenal world and the elegies that mark the stations of grief are angel commentaries that make her soul walk tolerable. Elephants may weep, but humans may translate the wisdom of Angels into plainsong so that we can comfort one another with the greatest gift from our ancestors.” British Columbia Review

“… these elegies, which carefully balance laments with reflections, are also imbued with a strong sense of place … on our islands: by the sea, in the forest, on the trail. [They] will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one, and equally with anyone who loves the pithiness of poetry.” Aqua Magazine

“How is it that language can encompass a loss so large it leaves us speechless? Zoë Landale’s elegies, using the rhythms and rhetoric of Rilke’s Duino Elegies as a springboard, find a way to say the unsayable. For those recovering from such a loss, or witnessing one, Orchid Heart Elegies offers sustenance and solace.” Rhea Tregebov, author of Rue des Rosiers

“[Landale] composes her querying losses with such dignity and grace that one doesn’t want to avoid this experience of mourning but celebrate the way that, through the pain, we persist, more fully alive.” Catherine Owen