A Haunting Sun

Lynn Szabo is an assistant professor of English and Coordinator of
Freshman English Courses at Trinity Western University.

In her first published volume of poetry, award-winning Manitoba painter
Brenda Schmidt sculpts short lyrics inspired by the landscapes of her
northern Manitoba wilderness home. Her speakers’ voices resonate with
topographic sensitivity that recognizes faces in the cracks of rocks,
“meaning melted / into little rivers flowing across ground still
frozen under the weak spring sun.” Her landscapes are rich with the
imagery of the northern prairies and its mining towns. Rhubarb, lilac,
sparrows, pussy willows, garage sales, and rock-face graffiti are the
staging effects for the canvasses on which she imagines herself as
having dug out a “still dark heart” in “a sunless city.” Into
the gaping hole made vacant by her artist’s violence, pleasure flows
like “a cut swelling blood.”

A Haunting Sun rewards readers with its stark Canadian motifs of
wilderness, survival, and raw beauty.