a keeper of things forgotten, a vase / for pictures made by words, a riverbed / for the stories you tell, an earthen silhouette / of a child

With vivid imagery and endless compassion for her subjects, Tanya Standish McIntyres words breathe life. Her richly lyrical phrases capture both the fear and the beauty of growing up in a rural working-class community, anchored by the magical bond between a young girl and her grandfather.

Ways Mills, Quebec, is the setting for these poems, although as with Mark Twains Mississippi, physical place becomes a place in the heart in this elegy for lost ancestral farms. Standish McIntyre gives voice to the unspoken, shining a light into the dark corners of our collective memory to reveal an indelible past that gleams with clarity, empathy, and humanity. Taking seed in the dilapidated barns and warm sunlit rooms of Standish McIntyres personal history, these poems weave a filigree of well-worn remembrances and time-honoured treaties of the self, half forgotten yet ever lingering.

Lucid, sharp, and crisp as spring water, this collection holds a sweeping narrative power that will stay with you long after the last line.