Finalist 2008 ReLit Award
Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-0-973395-26-6
$18.95 CDN / $17.95 US | Trade Paperback
July 2007
Natural Disasters is the debut poetry collection from Andrea MacPherson. It explores memory and history, asking if it is possible to inherit the past and the generational complexities that come along with it. Stories of lost sisters and marriages based on card games combine with the immediate and personal responses to wild fires and collapsed schoolhouses.
The collection is also concerned with place, from the dry land of the interior of British Columbia to the rugged beauty of the west coast shoreline. These settings affect not only language and mood, but tangible links to the past, the “dusky valleys” and “planks stained with fish blood”. Here, the tragic mingles with the everyday, allowing shadowy figures and hazy memory to once again become real.
Praise for Natural Disasters
This book captures the core of Andrea MacPherson’s Scots-Irish-Canadian heritage, where even spite is a delight and dread, delight and devotion all feed on the lush BC criss-cross of cedar cloak on tartan and saffron lines.⎯George McWhirter, Vancouver Poet Laureate
MacPherson knows where desire and grief, inextricably bound, lodge in the body and she knows that language can awaken memory to make ‘wings beat against the chest’. In Natural Disasters, the chest is pulled open to show the wings inside.⎯Stephanie Bolster, Governor General Award-winning poet
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.