Join Still Water Books and Art on Friday at 7:30 p.m. for an evening of poetry with two visiting poets – Garry Thomas Morse from Vancouver and Erling Friis-Baastad from Whitehorse, Yukon.
Morse, a young First Nations writer related to the Assu family, has been described as a writer with “rare imagination and incredible talent”. He will be reading from his fifth and latest book Discovery Passages; a homage to his ancestry that traces Capt. Vancouver’’s sailing route from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, and explores the implications of this early European contact with his people, the Kwakwaka’wakw.
Through word imagery and photography, Morse takes a journey through the past to discover and recover the traditions of his people – who witnessed family and tribal possessions become museum artifacts, and heard their history recounted through another language. Rita Wong is quoted as saying that “This poetic excavation of the injustice inflicted on the Kwakwaka’wakw people is insightful, tender, and brutal in its scope.”
Two of the photographs appearing in the book were taken by local writer/photographer Catherine Gilbert. Morse and Gilbert began an e-mail correspondence after Morse read her article about local author Frank Assu online last year, and he commissioned Gilbert to take photos of Quadra Island petroglyphs for Discovery Passages.
Erling Friis-Baastad is a Norwegian-born writer who emigrated from the States to Canada and the Yukon in 1974. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Malahat Review, Grain, Poetry Canada and Canadian Forum. Poetry Canada says that his poems “have a gift of ironic observation and introspection.” Not only is Friis-Baastad a poet, but he has been a book reviewer and journalist, and currently works as an editor with the Yukon News. He has been in Campbell River since December, staying at the Haig-Brown House with partner Patricia Robertson, and this will be the first time he has read to the local audience.
Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear two outstanding and diverse poets at their only Campbell River appearance.
For further information, call Still Water Books at 250-850-3103.