1996
Governor General's
Literary Award
Nominee

Charles Lillard has for three decades been a unique voice in western poetry. His is the voice of a boom man from Alaska informed by Rilke, equally at home with peavey and pen, reflecting upon the joy and anguish of the human spirit as it lives in the obdurate actuality of the rainshrouded, sunstruck, brutally beautiful West Coast of North America.

The landscape of Shadow Weather ranges from Alaska to Puget Sound -- a region known as the Sitka biome, the meeting of mountain and sea. It is a landscape of psyche and primordial myth, bred from stone, forest, ocean, and rainheavy weather.

In this edition of selected and new poems, Lillard has crafted a fresh definition of his journey along the axis of the Sitkan landscape -- the journey from the north of immediate engagement with a time that no longer exists to the south of present time. The book presents cycles of return: from south to north and back again, until it achieves a laying to rest of ghosts.

Poetry, 136pp
ISBN 1-55039-068-6, paper, $14.95