Treading Fast Rivers

By Eleonore Schönmaier
Series: Harbinger Poetry Series
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Ebook (PDF) : 9780773584464, 81 pages, September 1999
Paperback : 9780886293611, 72 pages, September 1999

Description

This collection of linked poems takes us on a journey where angels ride bicycles, wounds both grieve and heal, and "our will / diving through the shuddering / wet world, carries us." Resonant with "a longing so ardent and spacious," these are poems of place and displacement, sickness and health. A poet of striking maturity, Eleonore Schönmaier writes of icy depths and serene pools with equal ease. Unflinching when charting the terrains of human nature and the natural wilderness, she travels to such far-flung landscapes as Crete and Portugal, and the watery depths of the Sargasso Sea. Closer to home she looks beneath the surface of Northern mining communities and explores an abandoned lighthouse on the Atlantic coast.