June 2022

UPCOMING READINGS

friDAY, june 3, 2022

lorna crozier reads from the quiet in me

In this final collection, Patrick Lane cultivates the quiet of living in a body
amongst so many other bodies—the trout in the lake, geese arriving with
the wind, a raccoon fishing in a river—ultimately revealing a tangled web
of life and a speaker who sees both beauty and pain brimming around him.
Together, the poems in The Quiet in Me are a clear-eyed and sharp meditation
on existing in a world pulsing between life and death, death and life. When
the body is “a museum for what’s gone ” and a heart is “the sound of the wind
seething,” there is no answer but to learn the language of quiet; the language
of an earth unfolding itself perpetually in the dawn: “the song of the falling
water and wild birds.”

With incredible poetic precision, this collection is an offering—to come
back to yourself and to lose yourself in sight, sound and sense. Playing in
paradoxes—“empty marrow bones with their strings of red ants”—these
poems cultivate dualisms: intimacy and realism, vulnerability and the
roughness of youth, a scar that is a father’s teaching, a blade that is a sigh.

From one of Canada’s most lyric writers comes a book steeped in the wisdom
of the natural world. Told by an eye that never ceases to observe and a heart
that is willing to make itself known—to invite others into its warmth and
wilderness—this collection transposes leaf to leaf, stone to stone, reminding
us that water will always return to water and so will we.

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of
Canada’s finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up
in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily
in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very
Stone House, with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He won nearly every
literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General’s Literary Award to the
Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In 2014,
he became an Officer of the Order of Canada, an honour that recognizes a
lifetime of achievement and merit of a high degree.

Lorna Crozier is the author of several books including Small Beneath
the Sky (Greystone, 2009), The Book of Marvels (Greystone, 2012), and
What the Soul Doesn’t Want (Freehand, 2017), which was nominated for the
Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. She is a professor emerita at
the University of Victoria and an officer of the Order of Canada. She lives in
North Saanich, BC.

FriDAY, june 10, 2022

Poets caravan Celebration

Join us to celebrate our interactive digital archive of poets, the Poets Caravan! The evening will be co-hosted by Zoe Dickinson, the current PEP Artistic Director, and Daniel Scott, who is an AD emeritus and a huge driving force behind the Poets Caravan project.

Doors open at 7:00, event begins at 7:30. Refreshments, including alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages and sweet treats, will be provided at no charge (but we encourage you to bring a little extra cash to throw in our donation basket to help cover the costs). You might also want to bring a little cash to buy books from the poets, who have been invited to bring copies to sell. The event will be filmed as part of our Caravan project, but will not be livestreamed.

This promises to be a very special celebration, with readings from 28 of the 55 poets featured in the Caravan, including: Marlene Grand Maître, Richard Osler, Rhona McAdam, Jeremy Loveday, Yvonne Blomer, Kate Braid, Rhonda Ganz, Terese Svoboda, Ali Blythe, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Garth Martens, Gisela Ruebsaat, Pamela Porter, Wendy Donawa, Leanne Boschman, Anne Hopkinson, Sharon Lee, Daniel Scott, Stephen T Berg, Kyeren Regehr, Marie Metaphor Specht, John Barton, Marilyn Bowering, Christine Smart, Tina Biello, Kelsey Andrews, Andrea Raine, and Linda K Thompson.