Poetry. Pamela Porter's poems celebrate a world awaiting discovery. She opens this new collection with a poem entitled "An Offering" in which she brings to the ceremony "poems / for every season—of dreams born, / burning, broken" and, in particular, one that "begins like a perilous grace" to develop as "naked and tender and wanting." Throughout, one hears and sees images that connect both the poet and reader to other dimensions. Always for Porter, there is the moment tentatively coming into being where the mundane is transformed into something totally unexpected and otherworldly. The image can be one that develops from the natural world as in "Branches, Early Spring," where she sees how "the trees' red sap set the sky on fire." Another poem based in nature is "Naming" in which "small birds life into the sky / holding in their beaks / the words we don't need to say." Throughout, Porter's poems celebrate moments when we experience "the beginning of the world again."

Author City: Sidney, BC CAN

Pamela Porter is the author of the multiple award-winning novel The Crazy Man and three previous volumes of poetry: Stones Call Out, The Intelligence of Animals and CATHEDRAL. In 1988, she traveled to Nicaragua and Guatemala to document the experiences of ordinary people caught in the Contra war and the government sponsored terror against Guatemalan teachers and aid workers. Later with two children, she and her husband worked in Angola and Ghana. Pamela Porter is now a sessional instructor at the University of Victoria and lives on Vancouver Island with her husband, children, and a menagerie of rescued animals.