Emily Carr Country: Portrayed by Courtney Milne

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

Courtney Milne’s powerful and moving photographs are partnered here by
brief texts from the published writings of the West Coast painter and
writer Emily Carr. In a colorful, post-impressionist style, Carr
celebrated the vanishing villages and totems of West Coast Native
villagers, and the spiritual rhythms of West Coast terrain: its forests,
wildlife, beaches, and open skies. The short books that Carr wrote near
the end of her life—Klee Wyck, The Book of Small, and many
others—were published posthumously. Milne’s photography has long
been influenced by Carr’s writing and her paintings, as well as by the
West Coast terrain they both loved. To create this book, he collected
his favorite Carr quotations and combed through thousands of his
photographs of Carr’s terrain to find the perfect images to complement
that mystic landscape.

Robert Bateman’s foreword celebrates the spirituality central to
Milne’s work: “His photographs take us into realms beneath and in a
sense above, the literal surface of locations.” Bateman finds that a
deep force drives the work of both Carr and Milne. Emily Carr Country
includes both worlds, along with Milne’s spectacularly beautiful
photographs. Each of the six chapters is introduced by a substantial
essay by Milne concerning the area in question.

This beautiful and thoughtful celebration of an area that has attracted
poets and painters for centuries is highly recommended.