the shadow-maker

  

Gwendolyn MacEwen. The SHADOW-MAKER. Macmillan, 1969. 

A find at the Rotary book sale. A Governor-General Award winner from the 60s. I love her use of internal rhyme and the sound of her lines. Favourites are the dream sequences--from The Sleeper section. 

NINE HORSES

 Billy Collins. NINE HORSES. Random. 2002.

A surprise arrival from the Bookman. My favourite in this collection is "Elk River Falls", in which the water "unbuckled from itself / and plummets, shredded, through the air / into the shadows of a frigid pool, / so calm around the edges, a place / for water to recover from the shock / of falling apart and coming back together..."

INDIANS ON VACATION

Thomas King. INDIANS ON VACATION. HarperCollins, 2020.

Stephen Leacock Award Winner for Humour, and much much more. Funny, ironic, and endearing. A couple from Guelph, Mimi the artist and Bird, the journalist, retired, are on a quest for a lost sacred bundle stolen by Mimi's uncle when he ran away to join the Wild West Show. The Quest has been the couple's excuse to travel, to retrace Uncle's itinerary as documented in the postcards he sent home. Travel. Ancestry. An intimate long-term relationship. Mimi is positive and encouraging and knows her man. Bird is grumpy, obssessed with his decaying body, and travels with an entourage of "problems" to which he has given names,  Kitty=catastrophizing. D & D = Depression and Despair. Eugene = self-loathing, etc. The reader fears some catastrophy and recognizes the typical tourist challenges of self-guided travel. So many good conversations between Bird & Mimi, Bird and fellow travellers, and Bird and his "Issues". 

STICKBOY

 

Shane Koyczan. Stickboy. Parlance, 2008.

I have been a fan of this BC writer for 25 years, since I first heard about his win in San Francisco of the top Slam Poetry prize. Saw him perform at an early-century Café Deux Soleil on Commercial, Vancouver. Read & enjoyed Visiting Hours. Acquired some sort of CD, since disappeared. Revelled in his 2010 Olympics ceremony performance which includes this same theme of bullying. Watched the doc about his search for a father on Knowledge Network. Followed him on IG, when it worked. And jumped on this copy of Stickboy found at the Rotary Book sale.

I really enjoyed this book. Read most of it aloud to myself. It is smooth and affecting at the same time. I kept thinking: should be required reading for every teacher-in-training. Shane takes us inside the head of an unhappy child and how that unhappiness manifests in the real world of school and sport fields.

For a bit, I thought I must have missed the reference explaining the title, but info on Amazon or Goodreads suggests: an ironic reference to “sticks & stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”; an ironic contrast to nicknames “Fatboy” or “Fatass”; & a stick-drawn figure with firecrackers and dynamite sticks as appendages, ready to explode at any moment.

Accessibility. Insight. Humour. Survival.

A THOUSAND MORNINGS

 Mary Oliver. A THOUSAND MORNINGS. Penguin, 2012. 

Book sale find. Turns out to be a duplicate. Reread it anyway. Mary Oliver never disappoints. 

LILAC GIRLS

 Martha Hall Kelly. LILAC GIRLS. Ballantine/Penguin, 2017.

Book Club selection for September meeting, Lilac Girls, is almost 500 pages. It is based on true stories of a New York philanthropist & the Polish women in a Nazi concentration camp, Ravensbruck. After Born a Crime, this is my favourite book club book so far. It follows the lives of three women, American, Polish, & German, through WW II and after. Although some of the info about experiments on human guinea pigs is tough to read, it seemed important not to turn away from truths of history nor to blind myself to the reality that similar challenges are being lived today in Ukraine, Gaza, and America (and probably many other places we hear less news from).

TOOTH & NAIL

 Ian Rankin. TOOTH & NAIL. Orion, 1998. Originally published as WOLFMAN, 1992.

An early Rebus novel, re-titled. I had not read it before, even with the former title. Rebus is a younger inspector seconded to London to help with a serial killer case. The story has more sex and more "action" than later works, I assume because Rebus is younger although already worried about aging and not keeping in shape. Muscling. Car chases. A sub-theme is the early introduction of "psychological profiling" on police work. The tooth motif is used nicely throughout--bite marks on the corpses, dental care, etc.