Sky Humor

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.

The poems in this collection are open to the majesty and mystery of
nature, as well as to its indifference, whimsicality, cruelty, and even,
on occasion, sentimentality (a lost hunting knife is “licked clean /
and blessed” by coyotes). Stock characters of nature-myth, Raven and
Coyote, make brief, somewhat revisionist appearances.

Marty’s best poems are written in a comfortably natural Canadian
idiom infused with passion and lyricism. Some poems are close to
visionary, but the vision is variously tempered by good-natured irony,
self-deprecation, and subtle amusement. These are life-enhancing poems,
but elegy is not excluded; in “Sunflowers,” one senses a fundamental
sadness about the transience of life. Readers will be often taken by the
vigor and the originality of Marty’s images: hail becomes
“ice-marbles, heaven’s frozen spit”; cracked hands are “like the
mud of a dried up slough.”

Marty is an Albertan and “back to the land” environmentalist whose
other books include Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great
Chinook (1995) and Switchbacks: True Stories from the Rocky Mountains
(1999).