Canada's Environmental Voice
Art is powerful. Unlike science, which devotes itself to the refinement of analytical understanding, art has the capacity to go beyond hypothesis and fact to reveal something closer to emotional truth. Art can both explain the world around us, and inspire people to care about it.
Like the landscape it aims to preserve, the inherent power of This Soil, This Water comes from returning to and lingering- in its open spaces, nourishing colours and stoic wisdom. Environmental issues and controversies are certainly plentiful in 2012, but few books take aim with such subtle effectiveness, leaving room […]
When I was asked to compare nature literature in Canada and the United States, particularly in the West, I quickly went for my bookshelves – only to discover that the lion’s share of my library was still far away, sequestered, like a lost collection of ancient Middle Eastern scrolls in […]
BEHOLD THE SIMPLE CHICKADEE. With its black toupee, matching beard and silver jacket of wings, it is a bundle of quick intent. According to famed Canadian artist Robert Bateman, it also has a face to forget. “A chickadee’s face is like the end of a sock,” he remarks frankly from his […]
Good photographs and good poetry have a great deal in common: They both offer lessons in seeing, placing their audience as if behind the lens or the pen, opening them to the world in a way not before realized. Catherine Owen’s book of poetry, Seeing Lessons, demonstrates the power of […]
Fashion is one of the most profitable industries in the world, but we rarely hear about the ugly practices used to keep beauty in business. For instance, the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan has diminished by 90 per cent, partially due to the irrigation of cotton crops for the textile industry […]
“This boat grafts you to water’s big-winged glide,” observes Melanie Siebert in Deepwater Vee, her beautifully original debut poetry collection. Shortlisted for the 2010 Governor General’s Award, Deepwater Vee is itself a boat, gliding through Siebert’s 10 years as a professional guide on rivers from Alaska to Baffin Island, including the desecrated North Saskatchewan […]
You don’t often come across a book of innocent-looking doodles that has the power to make you reflect on the deeper meaning of life. Kate Bingaman-Burt’s Obsessive Consumption does just that.
Nancy Holmes, a professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, is to be congratulated for this plump and sumptuous anthology of English language Canadian nature poetry.
Information is important, but stories are essential. While scientists can tell us about the extinction of species and the loss of Arctic sea ice, we need stories to help us make sense of these events. But we are buried in unfinished stories. After decades of expert analysis, we remain unable […]
