Who Goes to the Park

Ann Tudor was the former Managing Editor of Canadian Book Review Annual and had her own Toronto-based crafts company, Honest Threads.

Warabé Aska is the nom de plume of Takeshi Masuda, a Japanese author who immigrated to Canada in 1979. This book is a collection of his paintings of Toronto’s High Park, the result of over two years of on-site sketching, note-taking, and photographing in High Park itself.

Facing each of the 14 paintings is a seven-line poem celebrating the particular aspect of the park evoked by the painting: “When the geese leave for the South / Sadness comes over the park. / Leaves blow like flags of farewell, / And doors shut tight against the cold. / Let us wish all the birds a safe journey. / Return geese, remember geese, / This is your home!”

The paintings are charming: skaters’ exhalations rise like lilies from their mouths; a circle of pine trees silhouetted against a night-time sky is echoed by a circle of cloud-cherubs; and the bare-branched oak tree (felled last year because of its age) sings lustily as it conducts itself, complete with baton, and its choir of red-winged blackbirds. The appeal of this book is not limited to children and not limited to Torontonians. Anyone who appreciates the value of a city park will be touched by these paintings.