The Stone Cloak

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island and an honorary chief of the Mi’kmaq of Prince
Edward Island.

In her first book of poems, Shari Andrews pays homage to her forebears
who emigrated from Denmark to Canada. In the face of hardship and
adversity, these early settlers displayed indomitable courage.
Andrews’s narrative weaves together archival research, folktales
handed down from generation to generation, and her own imaginative
reconstruction of events, thoughts, and feelings.

Andrews has a gift for metaphor; in one poem, a woman makes loaves,
“rolling the soft breasts between the palms.” Her eye for detail is
apparent in such lines as “poker flashing silver” and “the straw
bits of nests clinging to the branches.” She evokes pathos in “Blow
Out the Lamp” and a sense of the passage of time in “Going
Deeper.” Her book is recommended for the poetry and social studies
collections of school libraries.