Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry

by Madhur Anand (Editor), Adam Dickinson (Editor)

In every walk of Canadian life--from business to education to the everyday--the reality is that increasingly you will be in contact with Anishnaabe World. Knowing something about Aboriginal people and their reality not only gives you an advantage over those who don't, it's just plain polite in this country now called Canada. In the spirit of Thomas King, Drew Hayden Taylor and Tomson Highway, Roger Spielmann's Anishnaabe World is an irreverent, teasing, hilarious, yet cross-culturally astute "Survival Guide" for Canadians increasingly aware of our country's chequered past relations between Natives and non-Natives. Chief Ovide Mercredi says "I challenge the reader to really listen to what Roger Spielmann's saying."

Genres: Poetry, Nature

142 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Madhur Anand's debut book of creative nonfiction "This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart" (2020) won the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her debut collection of poems "A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes" (2015) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named one of 10 all-time "trailblazing" poetry collections by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Her second collection of poems "Parasitic Oscillations" (2022) was also a finalist for the Trillium Award for Poetry and named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. "To Place a Rabbit"(Knopf Canada) is her first novel. She is a professor and the director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability Laboratory at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

Reviews

[Kristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of contemporary Canadian poetry that talks about nature, the environment and environmental concerns. Some of the poems are explicitly about the areas around Sudbury that look like "moonscapes", or the tar sands in Alberta. Men changed the landscape, ruined it so to say and the poets call to us "Stop! Look around, preserve what!s left, pay more attention to the nature and the environment, start to make a difference!"

In the Tar Sands, Going Down (Mari-Lou Rowley)
[...]
Look up! look way up-
nothing but haze and holes.
Look down!
bitumen bite in the
neck arms thighs of Earth
a boreal blistering,
boiling soil and smoke-slathered sky.
[...]