The Blomidon Logs
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A spellbinding evocation of the power of memory and the spirit of place
Set in the small farming community of Blomidon on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy, The Blomidon Logs starts with tales of Glooscap and a leaky old cabin. Complete with the wild imagination of youth and rumours of a drowned artist, the book moves up the road to a new A-frame cottage and back in time to the generations who preceded the author at Blomidon, providing a rich heritage of farmland, beach, and stories. Taking its title from the logbooks kept by Dwyer’s parents, the collection is about childhood, family, and a time when summer meant freedom and outdoor play. The poems refer to the legends of the First Nations chief/god who once made his home at Blomidon and celebrate the work of farmers, loggers, and their families and predecessors who have made, and somehow still make, a living from the land.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is a beautiful book. Dwyer's (Going to the Eyestone) poetry and prose are accomplished, clean, and deceptively simple, shifting between free verse and loosely structured forms. Consumed with meditation on place and how the author fits into her family home, the book slips neatly into conventions of East Coast Canadian writing wrought with a strong sense of place at the edge of the world, where land meets sea. Though Dwyer's work moves beyond archetypes, readers may be troubled by her use of legends from the Wabanaki Confederacy which she learned growing up in the farming community of Blomidon, Nova Scotia as an interwoven framing device. She does not have a cultural connection to the legends, and her use of them has the effect of othering the original First Nations inhabitants of the region, seen only as ghosts with no mention of their living descendants and culture. The Wabanaki legends are entangled with Blomidon's history, and Dwyer seems unable to dissociate the cultural scavenging on which her home is built from her sense of self. Whatever Dwyer may have meant to broach with the book and one could rightly argue any number of broad themes for the work it becomes an unintended meditation on appropriation.
