New poetry collection speaks to and from the Island

In her third poetry collection, Judy Gaudet “brings us heart-deep and eye-level with Prince Edward Island’s fields, woods, and shores,” says Deirdre Kessler, former PEI Poet Laureate. Published by Island Studies Press, the book will be launched on March 24, at 7 pm, in the Faculty Lounge, Main Building Room 201, University of Prince Edward Island. 

Another Landscape addresses the ordinary wonders of a life shared with her partner and their dog, where “Nothing is needed. Everything is here between us.” Though the poems grow out of this one life on the Island, Gaudet takes the long view of time. She sees at once the molecules of the red sandstone cliffs and her own, that have held together for greatly different timespans. The poems gather small but notable moments of Island life and insist we look closer, for “this is life, as long as we have it.”

Readers will recognize the “fishing boats and their bright primaries” and “that open spot where the water is moving fast enough to not freeze up.” Gaudet’s poems, writes Richard Lemm, professor emeritus in English, speak to the human capacity to be renewed and deeply transfigured by observant intimacy with nature. And they return again and again to gratitude: “What luck to spend a lifetime / seeing what things are” and to her uplifting faith that there is “good luck and gold / flying up everywhere.”

Judy Gaudet is a Prince Edward Island poet and painter whose books include Conversation with Crows (Oberon, 2014) and Her Teeth Are Stones (Acorn, 2005). She is the editor of 150+: Canada’s History in Poetry (Acorn, 2018). 

The event is free, and all are welcome. Thanks to Bookmark, books will be available for purchase. For more information, contact Bren Simmers at Island Studies Press, 902-566-0386 or ispstaff@upei.ca.