ALONE ON A WINDY RIDGE: Many thanks

Monday, December 31, 2018

Many thanks

Today is New Year's Eve aka my last day as Saskatchewan Poet Laureate! Rhyme flies when you're having fun! Thank you to everyone across Saskatchewan and beyond for the magic you brought and continue to bring to each day! Thank you to Saskatchewan's strong writing community and exceptional poets for greatly enriching my life and making this job a great pleasure and great learning experience! Thank you to Saskatchewan's every cloud, every north wind, sloshing lake, twisting river, running sucker, every slough, soaring raven, agog gopher, carrion beetle, every spruce, every caragana, every crocus, every rock, every point on every blade of grass! Not to mention culverts! Thank you to the Saskatchewan Arts Board, Saskatchewan Book Awards, and the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, partners in the Poet Laureate program, which this last year of my term is under the patronage of the Lieutenant Governor, His Honour the Honourable W. Thomas Molloy and my first year was under the patronage of Her Honour the Honourable Vaughn Solomon Schofield. Thank you all! Saskatchewan is poetry! Happy New Year!

"This is a skilled poet having good fun, and inviting us all to join the party." - Shelley A. Leedahl, SaskBooks Reviews. Read more.

"Employing a variety of forms and the culvert stories — who knew? — of numerous people, she digs beneath the obvious roads to find out what keeps the water — the subconscious, the unconscious — flowing smoothly, discovering a variety of things about herself, notably the everyday masks we wear and the aging process we won’t always admit to." - Bill Robertson, The Star Phoenix. Read more.

"For Schmidt is indeed a poet. Readers can expect to encounter many visual and acoustic delights along the way, from internal rhymes to arresting images." - Trevor Cook, The Antigonish Review #196.

"In Grid..., Creighton's Brenda Schmidt turns a colder eye to the landscape than most other Canadian poets." - Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press. Read more.

"You can just feel the stones rattling off your undercarriage on this Grid." - Bill Robertson, The Star Phoenix. Read more.

"Like the Prairies, this is not a collection that gives itself away: the true beauty of this book lies in subtleties that may not be obvious at first glance." - Emily McGiffin, The Malahat Review. Read more.

"In Grid, moments are approached in their apparent stability only to be swept away in song rife with interruption and fresh stimuli, lending a new perspective. It is as though the familiar ground is an eye glancing back and the reflection only a nodal-point, open to opportunity and play." - Justin Dittrick, SPG Book Reviews. Read more.

"There is grit in these poems, so much that it seems unfair to think of them as nature poems; like the best nature writing, they undo our expectations of nature rather than uphold them." - Tanis MacDonald, Arc Poetry Magazine. Read more.

"In her fourth collection Grid, Schmidt’s wry humour transcends what we have watched heap up in Canada for more than a century—nature poems—balancing in canola fields between the beautiful lure of nature and our curious urge to separate ourselves from disappearing allotments of our own solace. We have wandered “off the grid” but fortunately Schmidt is an entertaining and insightful guide who can still find Li Po in a Dark-eyed Junco, if she has to." - Garry Thomas Morse, Jacket 2. Read more.

"These supple, witty, and incisive poems delineate our relationship to grids and systems both visible and invisible, natural and political." - Judges' citation, Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry nomination. Jurors: Shawna Lemay, Barbara Nickel, Sharon Thesen.