Full Description
Rain Shadow is a collection of poetry that explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and humans yearning to connect with something greater than themselves. The poems range through destabilized lives and landscapes, fathoming presence and absence, transformation and oblivion. They outline the major questions of our time as the poet crisscrosses western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Witty, playful, serious, and heartsore, Rain Shadow seeks to understand the space in which people and nature are inextricably entwined.
I walk like a bear—
I have a bear's gait—
but the gate to the bear's mind is closed.
—from "The Bear and the Wind"
Contents
I - The Same Mountain Twice
The Same Mountain Twice
Gray Wolf Pass
Glacial Suite
Appleton Pass: Watershed Nocturne
Song of the Notch
Song of the Wind-Loaded Ledges
Larches on the Continental Divide
Whiteout in May
Some Goats
Fat Salmon in the Clearwater River
Sea to Sky
Port Angeles
Quadrilateral
Fall Classic
2 - Thisness
Thisness
Ecosystem
Square
Schist
First, Failure
Failure Revisited
Eclipse
A Premise in Kamloops
Spell for the Museum of the Canadian Rockies
To Gordon Burles
Sunplay on Mountains
In the Spirit World, on a Rock
High Meadows, September
Salmon Reconsidered: Goldstream River
In Winter's Nick
Seasonal
For the Millionth Time
Maundy Thursday
Invocation
3 - Instructions for Travel
Instructions for Travel
Teachers and Pupils
A Lesson on Mount Rexford
Late August, Nesakwatch Spires
Snow Dome
On Reading Conquistadors of the Useless, by Lionel Terray
Mountain Failure
Mount Rundle: Second Attempt: 18 September
Avalanche Bulletin
At Bozeman International, in Hugo Country
Contra Naturam
In Midair
Transcontinental
Cancer magister
Cycling
The Earthquake
On Corporeal Existence
4 - Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses
The Beasts
New England Aquarium
Photosynthesis
Horses off the Kitsap Shore
Hot Spell in Wet Country
Spell for the Elwha River
In Praise of the Mountain Pine Beetle
Pastoral
Auspex Maximus
Sightings
Several Birds
Guillemots et guillemets
Auks Redux
Migration to the Antipodes
Biography
The Emperor of Ice
Grizzly
The Bear and the Wind
Acknowledgements
