Images of Nature: Canadian Poets and the Group of Seven

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

In this handsome book, David Booth has cleverly matched the poems of
some of Canada’s best poets to the landscape paintings of some of
Canada’s best artists—the Group of Seven.

The paintings include old favorites like Tom Thomson’s The Jack Pine,
J.E.H. MacDonald’s The Tangled Garden, and Lawren Harris’s Above
Lake Superior, and relatively unknown ones like Franklin Carmichael’s
The Glade. The poems are by F.R. Scott, John Robert Colombo, Elizabeth
Brewster, Leonard Cohen, Jean Little, Earle Birney, A.M. Klein, and a
traditional Inuit singer, among others. The choices are excellent, the
pairings often ingenious. For example, A.Y. Jackson’s First Snow
Algoma, which shows a forest of red maples through a fine screen of fat
flakes, is matched with Doug Beardsley’s “Fall”: “The first snow
guards the hillside / Like the white wrist of winter / The fist is not
far behind.”

David Booth is the author of more than 30 books, a professor in the
Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto, and a frequent
contributor to radio and television discussions of books for young
people. Images of Nature would be an excellent text for use in Canadian
art, Canadian literature, and/or Canadian Studies classes, or simply as
a welcome fireside companion. I can’t think of a better way to
introduce young people to Canadian poetry. Highly recommended.