When I Was Young and in My Prime

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta. He is co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, author of The Salvation Army and
the Public, and editor of “Improved by Cult

“Love? Though we all know the world is distended and threadbare with
too many wearings and mendings and bleachings and though lately the
moral of each day’s story seems to come back to how impossible it is
to know another person and though I could very easily be deluding
myself, I think maybe just maybe I might be feeling the shape of it
rising in me lately like a kind of groundwater ever-so-slowly by
fractions and increments towards places I hadn’t expected to feel
it.”

In such beautifully poetic language Alayna Munce weaves a tapestry of
reflections on the nature of love and how it controls our reason for
living. In small poems, longer personal memories, and conversations,
from the points of view of several speakers from three different
generations, she confronts us with vivid depictions of how past and
present merge into old age, how memories are cherished and cast away,
how people deal with the awful presence of Alzheimer’s, how
generations experience and re-experience the same joys and sorrows, and,
ultimately, when there is love, how death comes as a blessing. It is a
wise book, making you laugh and weep, sometimes at the same experience.
Munce is a very gifted writer who is bound to be heard from again.