Description
In the winter of 2009, Harry Thurston travelled to Campbell River on Vancouver Island to serve a term as writer-in-
residence in the former home of the renowned fisherman and environmentalist Roderick Haig-Brown. While there, he and his
longtime friend Allan Cooper embarked on a poetic correspondence; Thurston would send his Campbell River poems east and
Cooper would reply. In this, they were consciously following the model of the Wang River Sequence, a poetic correspondence
written by the Chinese poets Wang Wei and P’ei Ti over 1200 years ago. “Our poetryseparatelyhas always been rooted
deeply in the natural world,” writes Thurston. “Like many other Western poets, we have looked to the East, to classical
Chinese poetry, as one model to best express our relationship with what we now call the environment, a no less reverential
term than Nature.” The resulting twenty-one poems are reflective and richly imagistic, chronicling a single winter season
as experienced by two writers on opposite Canadian coasts.
About the authors
Allan Cooper has published nineteen collections of poetry, including Everything We've Loved Comes Back to Find Us (Gaspereau Press, 2017), Toward the Country of Light: New and Selected Poems (Pottersfield Press, 2018), and Waiting for the Small Ship of Desire (Pottersfield Press, 2020). He has twice won the Alfred G. Bailey Award for poetry and received The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize of the New Brunswick Book Awards in 2018 and 2021. He is the founder of Owl's Head Press and has been the editor of the intermittently published literary journal Germination since 1982. Cooper is also a songwriter and performer. His recent musical projects include Rosedale and Songs for a Broken World. He divides his time between his ancestral home in Alma, New Brunswick, and Riverview.
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Harry Thurston is the author of several collections of poetry and twelve nonfiction books, including Tidal Life: A Natural History of the Bay of Fundy, winner of three non-fiction prizes in the Atlantic region; The Nature of Shorebirds: Nomads of the Wetlands; and A Place between the Tides: A Naturalist's Reflections on the Salt Marsh, which received the 2005 Sigrid Olson Nature Writing Award in the United States and was shortlisted for the 2005 BC Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. He has also written for such magazines as Audubon, Canadian Geographic, and National Geographic. Thurston lives in Nova Scotia.
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Other titles by
The Face of Everything
Conversations with Donald Hall
Waiting for the Small Ship of Desire
Toward the Country of Light
New and Selected Poems 1978-2018
Everthing We’ve Loved Comes Back To Find Us
The Alma Elegies
Gabriel’s Wing
Singing the Flowers Open
Hidden River Poems
Blood Lines
Poems by Allan Cooper
