Breaking the Surface
Marilyn Bowering, Lorna Crozier, Susan Musgrave, Linda Rogers, Patricia Young, and introducing fifteen new voices
In this unique book, five acclaimed Canadian poets offer their own superbly crafted new work alongside that of fifteen exciting new voices. Not only inspired reading, Breaking the Surface offers new insights into the poetic imagination of a country internationally renowned for fine writing.
Poetry, 294 pp, 6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-106-2, paper, $24.95
The Colour of Bones in a Stream
Brian Brett
A shape change from one of Canada's best poets: long, lush lines and brim-full pages. Brett explores the edges of risk and outrage and then delivers a platter of excess in a series of poems devoted to food.
There's a dead sheep in the mud room. Outside, a raven who steals the eyes of lambs circles above the trees as a cat with bloody jaws brings his gift of feathers to the door. Brian Brett, an ungentlemanly farmer, writes of this place that is also the world—half paradise, half abattoir. He is a man with a huge appetite for words. He offers these poems as he'd offer loaves of bread, fresh, hard-crusted. We break them together and devour, our mouths warm with such a taste.—LORNA CROZIER
Poetry, 108pp, 6 × 9
ISBN 1-55039-084-8, paper, $13.95
The Creature I Am
Denise Cammiade
with illustrations by Jenny Munro
Denise Cammiade's poems sing with honesty and lyrical grace. In this, her first and last book, she writes with piercing insight of creatures human and otherwise; of the forgotten meaning in waves, birds, everyday moments. Befitting such stellar work, The Creature I Am boasts superb production values, and features beautiful colour illustrations by Jenny Munro.
POETRY • 48 pp • 4 interior colour illustrations • 6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-133-X • paper • $16.95
Duet for Wings and Earth
by Barbara Colebrook Peace
Barbara's Colebrook Peace's re-imagining of the Christ story takes the reader on a journey that is at once familiar and marvellously mythical. Drawn from the Biblical record, these beautifully-wrought poems written from multiple points of view – God's, Christ's, Mary's, Joseph's, an innkeeper's, the manger's, and even a donkey's -- illuminate the landscape of first century Jerusalem. By turns playful, meditative and mystical, these imaginative renderings, imbued with the poet's deeply personal spirituality, grapple with the immensity of space and time and our small place in them.
6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-164-X • paperback • $14.95
Climate and the Affections
Crispin Elsted
1996 Governor General's Award Nominee!
Elsted seems to write with sound in his thought; the moods within these poems shift like key changes. Patterns of language and order—natural, intellectual, artistic, social—inform the whole work. A first book of great maturity and complexity.
Poetry, 96 pp, 6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-064-3, paper, $12.95
Wearing My People Like a Shawl
by Dorothy Field
Reading Dorothy Field's second collection of poems, "Wearing My People Like a Shawl," is like entering a rich, digressive, passionate, multi-layered novel, at the heart of which is the individual in search of self. Field's physical journey takes her to Israel, the American deep south, India, New York and Western Canada. At the same time, these poems attempt to penetrate the past, the complex and indecipherable lives of her parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents. In an attempt to understand her family's often confusing and conflicted relationship to their Jewishness, Field revisits her fifties childhood, becoming again the sharply observant child.
6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-166-6 • paperback • $14.95
This will be (although poets have said this before and lied) Leona Gom's last book of poetry. All four of her first books Kindling, 1972; The Singletree, 1975; Land of the Peace, 1980; NorthBound, 1984 have now been out of print for some time. Sono Nis Press is proud to issue this definitive collection of the work of one of British Columbia's most popular poets. Her work has been honoured with many awards, including the Canadian Authors' Association poetry award for Land of the Peace and the B.C. Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for her first novel Housebroken. She has had two other novels published, Zero Avenue and The Y Chromosome.
Poetry, 273 pp, 6 × 9
ISBN 1-55039-009-0, paper, $16.95
Shadow Weather
Poems: Selected & New
Charles Lillard
Lillard's knowledge of the north coast, the landscape where mountains meet the sea, is unmatched. All the figures in Lillard's poems, living or dead, shaman or wife, are alive with him in the land. Lillard revisits 30 years of work; his is a stunning voice bred from stone, forest, ocean and rainheavy weather.
Poetry, 136pp
ISBN 1-55039-068-6, paper, $14.95
Threshold
edited by Rona Murray
works by
Barbara Colebrook Peace,
Dorothy Field,
Alisa Gordaneer,
Kelly Parsons,
Suzanne Steele, and
Susan Stenson
Open this book at any page and you will find a poem worth reading. The six writers in this fine anthology may not be well known, but they are not "beginners"; they are skilled and confident and intelligent. Reading their work is, to quote Barbara Peace, like "opening silence." Rona Murray is to be congratulated for bringing together such excellent work in this collection.—LEONA GOM
Poetry, 148 pp, 6 × 9
ISBN 1-55039-092-9, paper, $14.95
I Will Ask for Birds
by Kelly Parsons
What is perhaps most remarkable in this, Kelly Parsons' first collection, is the authenticity of voice, a voice which exudes a largeness of spirit and depth of feeling. Each word, line and stanza of "I Will Ask for Birds" seems to reverberate outward, in waves of radiant light. Whether writing about an old jacket, her dog, or a llama's visit to the art gallery, Parsons' exquisite sensibility infuses poem after poem with a quiet luminosity. Unlike many who rush into print, Parsons, a Buddhist, has waited to publish poems that have been polished over time like smooth river stones. For this we can be grateful.
6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-165-8 • paperback • $14.95
Kyrie
Barbara Colebrook Peace
Kyrie: a prayer calling for compassion, remembrance and homecoming.
Kyrie is a rich lyrical journey through the dark night of loss and being lost. A search for the faceless and forgotten - the elderly with dementia, a sleeping mother with cancer, laboratory pigeons. 'The far side of the moon', 'just north of sorrow', is Peace territory. This poet is original, unsentimental voice provides a compassionate map of her country. One we shan't forget. As Wilfred Owen said in a different context, The Poetry is in the pity. - P. K. Page.
Poetry, 76 pp, 6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-117-8, paper, $14.95
The poems in Heaven Cake are at once familial and global, homilies told by a grandmother to the younger generation gathered around her. Linda Rogers has collected people she knows and people she knows about, finding them in poems that turn upon change and life transitions. This is a very rich written tapestry from one of Canada's foremost poets.
Poetry, 86 pp, 6 × 9
ISBN 1-55039-072-4, paper, $13.95
The Saning is the sixth book Sono Nis Press has published by Linda Rogers. Her newest book of poetry is written in the belief that our words can still connect us to one another in ways that reveal an ethical system beyond the age of information. The subjects of the poems are living their way to grace. Their acts of courage and compassion are celebrated by a poet who cherishes the small ceremonies that make us human.
Poetry, 128 pp, 6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-099-6, paper, $14.95
Finely crafted poems about family relations, memory, longing, identity—the ordinary in everyday life elevated to prayer.—SUSAN MUSGRAVE
Poetry, 80 pp, 6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-073-2, paper, $13.95
Could Love a Man
Susan Stenson
In this first collection of poetry, Susan Stenson appears before the reader as a fully realized talent, as someone who has been writing for decades instead of only a few years. Hers is a landscape that runs from the heat of Mazatlán to the damp streets of Dublin. Along the way, she pulls us into gardens where infidelity grows wild, into hotel rooms and private schools, up the mountain slopes of Machu Picchu. We meet lucky drunks and dying men, pregnant women who drive taxis. We sit in bars alongside “winter’s low paunch of sun,” and we listen, because in this book a powerful voice is speaking. - Terence Young
Poetry, 74 pp, 6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-118-6, paper, $14.95