The phone rings and it is our neighbour to the east of us. There are wolves on the road again, heading our way. When we hurry to look, there they are–three wolves, bigger than you’d expect, trotting confidently on the packed snow in the middle. A fourth is in the ditch, the black one this time, and I know there must be a fifth circling through the roadside brush. They are hunting deer and the road is their tactical tool. Whatever we make of it is no concern of theirs.
“Here are lessons in fluidity: memories of youth and age are blended as upheavals of past wars resonate with refugees of today. Borders shift—borders between people, borders between the possessors and the dispossessed of the enduring land, and the borders that both separate and unite us with the natural world and with each other.”
—Joan Baril, Literary Thunder Bay
This is the preface to a remarkable grouping of approachable poems. The author’s early experiences as a refugee in post-World War II Europe culminate today in his “wild garden” home on a small patch of unceded territory of Treaty Three in South Eastern Manitoba, Canada. The poems tend toward realism and are informed by a sense of place, social justice and the wild.