Paperback
978-1-77212-370-8Size: 5¼" x 9"
Pages: 120
Pages: 144
epub
978-1-77212-648-8Pages: 144
Rain Shadow
Robert Kroetsch Series
By Nicholas Bradley
Rain Shadow is a collection of poetry that explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and humans yearning to connect with something greater than themselves. The poems range through destabilized lives and landscapes, fathoming presence and absence, transformation and oblivion. They outline the major questions of our time as the poet crisscrosses western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Witty, playful, serious, and heartsore, Rain Shadow seeks to understand the space in which people and nature are inextricably entwined.
I walk like a bear—
I have a bear’s gait—
but the gate to the bear’s mind is closed.
—from “The Bear and the Wind”
Book details
Publication date: February 2018Series: Robert Kroetsch Series
Keywords: Poetry / Canadian Literature
Subject(s): POETRY / Canadian, Creative Writing, Creative Writing / Poetry, Poetry / Canadian Literature, Poetry, Regional Interest, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Nature, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Places, Poetry, Poetry / Canadian Literature
Publisher(s): The University of Alberta Press
Book details
Publication date: February 2018Series: Robert Kroetsch Series
Keywords: Poetry / Canadian Literature
Subject(s): POETRY / Canadian, Creative Writing, Creative Writing / Poetry, Poetry / Canadian Literature, Poetry, Regional Interest, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Nature, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Places, Poetry, Poetry / Canadian Literature
Publisher(s): The University of Alberta Press
Nicholas Bradley. Nicholas Bradley is a poet, literary critic, and scholarly editor. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Victoria.
"[Rain Shadow] fits easily into my shelf of place-aware, place-engaged, self-examining literature from the North American West.... Bradley has a real knack for the potent ending. His final lines simultaneously turn his poems and sprout from them, meaning that each piece in this collection tugs you to stop a minute before you move to the next page.... He slips between registers with ease, blending humour with story with reflection..." [Full review at http://boughtbooks.blogspot.com/2018/08/nicholas-bradley-rain-shadow.html]
"Told in four parts, the collection centers thematically around the way humans move through, connect to, and are ultimately alien from our surrounding landscapes.... The poet’s haunting voice floats through existential thoughts, alternating between the abstract and the visceral.... In a time when the effects of climate change ravage our natural landscapes and the disconnect between citizen and cosmos seems ever widening, the poems are prescient.... Bradley sketches scenes ever on the edge of disaster, where all life is precious and profound, and rests in the shadow where little rain falls and true growth is a struggle, not to be taken for granted." [Full review at https://www.splitrockreview.org/rain-shadow-review]
"Bradley describes and appeals to massive elemental forces and beings, like earthquakes and avalanches, bears and killer whales.... Figurative language and wordplay, often subtle, appear throughout the collection....Some of these poems celebrate wildlife and wildness; some highlight the uneasy and destructive relationships we maintain with our fellow earthlings". [Full review at https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1509&context=thegoose]
"[In his] stunning first collection....Bradley's impulse isn't to rub our faces in mortal mud, it's to see survival—even glimpses of transcendence—through that mortality..."
The Same Mountain Twice
Gray Wolf Pass
Glacial Suite
Appleton Pass: Watershed Nocturne
Song of the Notch
Song of the Wind-Loaded Ledges
Larches on the Continental Divide
Whiteout in May
Some Goats
Fat Salmon in the Clearwater River
Sea to Sky
Port Angeles
Quadrilateral
Fall Classic
2 - Thisness
Thisness
Ecosystem
Square
Schist
First, Failure
Failure Revisited
Eclipse
A Premise in Kamloops
Spell for the Museum of the Canadian Rockies
To Gordon Burles
Sunplay on Mountains
In the Spirit World, on a Rock
High Meadows, September
Salmon Reconsidered: Goldstream River
In Winter’s Nick
Seasonal
For the Millionth Time
Maundy Thursday
Invocation
3 - Instructions for Travel
Instructions for Travel
Teachers and Pupils
A Lesson on Mount Rexford
Late August, Nesakwatch Spires
Snow Dome
On Reading Conquistadors of the Useless, by Lionel Terray
Mountain Failure
Mount Rundle: Second Attempt: 18 September
Avalanche Bulletin
At Bozeman International, in Hugo Country
Contra Naturam
In Midair
Transcontinental
Cancer magister
Cycling
The Earthquake
On Corporeal Existence
4 - Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses
The Beasts
New England Aquarium
Photosynthesis
Horses off the Kitsap Shore
Hot Spell in Wet Country
Spell for the Elwha River
In Praise of the Mountain Pine Beetle
Pastoral
Auspex Maximus
Sightings
Several Birds
Guillemots et guillemets
Auks Redux
Migration to the Antipodes
Biography
The Emperor of Ice
Grizzly
The Bear and the Wind
Acknowledgements
Nicholas Bradley. Nicholas Bradley is a poet, literary critic, and scholarly editor. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Victoria.
"[Rain Shadow] fits easily into my shelf of place-aware, place-engaged, self-examining literature from the North American West.... Bradley has a real knack for the potent ending. His final lines simultaneously turn his poems and sprout from them, meaning that each piece in this collection tugs you to stop a minute before you move to the next page.... He slips between registers with ease, blending humour with story with reflection..." [Full review at http://boughtbooks.blogspot.com/2018/08/nicholas-bradley-rain-shadow.html]
"Told in four parts, the collection centers thematically around the way humans move through, connect to, and are ultimately alien from our surrounding landscapes.... The poet’s haunting voice floats through existential thoughts, alternating between the abstract and the visceral.... In a time when the effects of climate change ravage our natural landscapes and the disconnect between citizen and cosmos seems ever widening, the poems are prescient.... Bradley sketches scenes ever on the edge of disaster, where all life is precious and profound, and rests in the shadow where little rain falls and true growth is a struggle, not to be taken for granted." [Full review at https://www.splitrockreview.org/rain-shadow-review]
"Bradley describes and appeals to massive elemental forces and beings, like earthquakes and avalanches, bears and killer whales.... Figurative language and wordplay, often subtle, appear throughout the collection....Some of these poems celebrate wildlife and wildness; some highlight the uneasy and destructive relationships we maintain with our fellow earthlings". [Full review at https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1509&context=thegoose]
"[In his] stunning first collection....Bradley's impulse isn't to rub our faces in mortal mud, it's to see survival—even glimpses of transcendence—through that mortality..."
The Same Mountain Twice
Gray Wolf Pass
Glacial Suite
Appleton Pass: Watershed Nocturne
Song of the Notch
Song of the Wind-Loaded Ledges
Larches on the Continental Divide
Whiteout in May
Some Goats
Fat Salmon in the Clearwater River
Sea to Sky
Port Angeles
Quadrilateral
Fall Classic
2 - Thisness
Thisness
Ecosystem
Square
Schist
First, Failure
Failure Revisited
Eclipse
A Premise in Kamloops
Spell for the Museum of the Canadian Rockies
To Gordon Burles
Sunplay on Mountains
In the Spirit World, on a Rock
High Meadows, September
Salmon Reconsidered: Goldstream River
In Winter’s Nick
Seasonal
For the Millionth Time
Maundy Thursday
Invocation
3 - Instructions for Travel
Instructions for Travel
Teachers and Pupils
A Lesson on Mount Rexford
Late August, Nesakwatch Spires
Snow Dome
On Reading Conquistadors of the Useless, by Lionel Terray
Mountain Failure
Mount Rundle: Second Attempt: 18 September
Avalanche Bulletin
At Bozeman International, in Hugo Country
Contra Naturam
In Midair
Transcontinental
Cancer magister
Cycling
The Earthquake
On Corporeal Existence
4 - Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses
The Beasts
New England Aquarium
Photosynthesis
Horses off the Kitsap Shore
Hot Spell in Wet Country
Spell for the Elwha River
In Praise of the Mountain Pine Beetle
Pastoral
Auspex Maximus
Sightings
Several Birds
Guillemots et guillemets
Auks Redux
Migration to the Antipodes
Biography
The Emperor of Ice
Grizzly
The Bear and the Wind
Acknowledgements
