• Age: 15
• Grade: 10

In her first book of poetry, Ursula Vaira captures the rugged and challenging beauty of the West Coast landscape in three poignant stories.

The first, told through a set of linked poems, describes her thirty-day, thousand-mile paddle from Hazelton to Victoria with skipper Roy Henry Vickers. "Journeys 97" was an RCMP-First Nations venture to raise addictions awareness and to offer on opportunity for the government to apologize for their role in the legacy of the residential schools. Vaira bears witness.

'A heck of a wind/ bounces me into the mountains'...So begins the second poem, "Frog River," the story of a woman's stay in an isolated hunter's cabin 129 km north of Muncho Lake in the northern Rockies. She is not sure whether she has left her lover or just left him behind, whether love is more dangerous than anything she might encounter in the wilderness.

"Last One to Get There," the third and final journey in Vaira's new collection, is a poem of place, of landscape and of West Coast imagery from a twenty-two-day kayaking journey that rounded Cape Scott and Cape Cook on Vancouver Island.

Lorna Crozier has called these poems "talismans of grace, beauty and healing." In And See What Happens, Ursula Vaira writes the poetry of three transformative journeys in British Columbia's wilderness.

Ursula Vaira's poems have been published in literary journals and in anthologies. The long poem, "Frog River," was published as a chapbook and is forthcoming in the Portage Anthology. The title poem of her collection, "And See What Happens," was a finalist
in the CBC Literary Competition and was published in slightly different form as a chapbook called A Thousand Miles. "Last One to Get There" was published in a chapbook titled Little Espinoza.

Ursula worked at Oolichan Books for ten years then founded her own publishing house, Leaf Press, in 2001.

Ursula Vaira's profile page

"To share the three journeys of this volume of poems with Ursula Vaira is a rare treat indeed … 'A stone softened in the mouth/will speak,' Vaira tells us. Her poems are as eloquent as softened stones."

—Glen Sorestad

"John Berger writes that poetry is closer to prayer than it is to prose. These poems are proof of that. Without shirking the shameful history of the province, they become talismans of grace, beauty and healing. Go on this journey with Ursula Vaira. You’ll find yourself falling into the sky."

--Lorna Crozier

And See What Happens: The Journey Poems

Vaira’s book is organized into three sections. The first chronicles her arduous 1000 mile journey from Hazelton to Victoria in a Coast Salish canoe. The poems, rich in imagery, focus on healing from addiction and the abuses of residential schools where “screams echo from the halls.” Vaira’s spiritual journey takes her to coastal communities where “the people sing us in to share.” In the second section Vaira describes her stay at an isolated cabin in the Canadian Rockies. Her poems capture the beauty of her surroundings but are full of tension as she is acutely aware of the dangers surrounding her. In the third section Vaira’s poems centre on a kayak journey around northern Vancouver Island where she is humbled by the majestic landscape of the rainforests and the power of the Pacific Ocean.