Victorian life at the Cape, 1870-1900

Arts & Photography

Catherine Knox

History & Criticism

Fernwood Press

This magnificent book on the Cape heaths illustrates a diverse and complex genus in which fully two-thirds of all species are native to South Africa. All 450 species are described and accompanied by one or more superb color photographs.

Ericas of South Africa

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Schumann, Dolf

Kirsten, Gerhard

Gardening & Landscape Design

Bushveld Trees Lifeblood of the Transvaal Lowveld

Malcolm Funston

Daughters in the City: Mennonite Maids in Vancouver, 1931-61

Ruth Derksen Siemens

Andrea Potos's poems are permeated by an expansive sense of kinship. Blood family are precious, but equally intimate are luminary writers with whom she finds soul connections. Although most of these figures are physically absent, all are a vital presence in Potos's "rooms of thought." She recommends (and practices) not getting snagged in appearances but "look[ing] slant" to find what is enduring. This is what she calls "graz[ing] with your consciousness" to gather joy. This is no simplistic pursuit. Rather, she's in agreement with C.S. Lewis's insight that "joy is the serious business of heaven." Potos understands that it takes committed work to choose and own joy. These poems involve aging parents, cancer, dread, death, grief, funerals-the hard times that generate hard questions. But they also celebrate the sustaining "underpinnings of dailiness"-laundry, coffee, washing dishes, brushing hair, bird song, vegetables, floral dresses. As those who are now absent become valued mental companions, she discovers "a peace whisper[ing] to her...a different happiness unfolding." The gift of these poems is in how Potos thoughtfully weighs what is given and what is taken, how life both fulfills and disappoints, and determines to let joy keep her. "Breathing deeply is simple, and hope is the natural choice."

Her Joy Becomes

Literature & Fiction

Potos, ANDREA

Poetry

In death will come, poet Bill Denham attempts what is nearly impossible, coming to terms with the approaching end of life without nostalgia or sentimentality. And in this collection, he succeeds, offering his astonishing gift to the world, a testament to a life lived, suffered, and loved in open-hearted service and wonder. The poems are interrelated confessions that speak directly to Denham's mother, to his father, to his estranged daughters. They reveal with painful, lyric candor, what it is to struggle with self-knowing in the face of death. A must read for anyone who will someday pass from this world.

death will come

Denham, Bill

Emmett Wheatfall's As Clean as a Bone is a collection of poems for both the heart and the mind, a collection seasoned with the vital and invigorating salt of poetry and wisdom. Through clean, crafted lines that ring out, these remarkable poems question history, memory, culture. These poems don't just talk: they wrestle with experience, they debate, they think and play, they sing out with love and pain. "Can we sing a new song?" Emmett Wheatfall asks. With their deft musical cadences and resonant depths, the poems in this new book answer back with a resounding YES.

As Clean as a Bone

Emmett, Wheatfall

Our love songs have no shadows. We dare not acknowledge the deep love that can coexist with loss. But in this timely and timeless collection, Peg Edera offers what we didn't know we needed: a proposal in the dark, a squad car filled with lilacs, tears saved for the right time, toast and honey.
The world of illness and dying is demanding and complex. Peg documents the love of her life, her husband Fred: his diagnosis with frontal temporal lobe dementia and ALS, the loneliness of missing him before he was gone, worry for their daughter, and grieving in all its dimensions and untimeliness. Fred died at home, shortly after he turned sixty-seven.
In writing, Peg uncovered tender truths, unlikely humor, the faithful awareness of deep-hearted love in an unpredictable world. And hope for the future.

Love Is Deeper than Distance: Poems of Love, Death, a Little Sex, ALS, Dementia and the Widow's Life Thereafter

Self-Help

Edera, Peg

Relationships

A gentle wind blows through Paul Jolly's poems, uncovering the gaps in our knowledge, our presumptions and assumptions, the spaces in which humor, creativity, and magic are born. The stories seem familiar, but the wind-blown words, unjumbled by Jolly, no longer say exactly what they're supposed to. Alice escapes from a pack of Disney scouts. Over-inflated cows float over a squadron of slugs. Ice cream trucks play Christmas songs.
It is a collection that rebels against reality. Each poem performs a sleight-of-hand replacement of the objective and concrete with imagination and dream. What if? How come? Why not? 
Read these poems. Read them carefully. Take your time. Inhale, exhale, and think. Why Ice Cream Trucks Play Christmas Songs is a work of art, and it is a gift.

Why Ice Cream Trucks Play Christmas Songs

Jolly, Paul

Religion & Spirituality

to the water signs who made me to the loves & lovers who've held me to every version of my self I am trying to love this is how I feel the world

I was raised in a house of water

Klatt, Juniper

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Books by Fernwood Press