Towards the Quiet

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island and Honorary Chief of the Mi'kmaq of Prince Edward
Island.

This book serves as a personal travelogue, in which the author searches
for his own “diastole of homeland,” be it Britain, India, East
Africa, or Canada. Lopes adopts a cryptic, paratactic style, beading
together telegrammatic phrases (the haiku poems are extreme examples)
and thereby creating a sense of immediacy. His comments, often in the
form of a concluding afterthought, are variously humorous, subtly
ironic, plangent. He is a master of metaphor: “contorted spirits in
shades of ebony,” for instance, or “green hills rolling from his
lips.” The occasional name may puzzle Western readers, but none can
fail to appreciate his uncanny sense of place, which he recaptures in
the sights and sounds around him.