Robinson's Crossing
Description
The poems in this book arise from Robinson's Crossing-the place where the railway ends and European settlers arriving in northern Alberta had to cross the Pembina River and advance by wagon or on foot. How have we crossed into this country, with what violence and what blind love? Robinson's Crossing enacts the pause at the frontier, where we reflect on the realities of colonial experience, but also on the nature of living here-on historical dwelling itself. In long meditative narratives and shorter probing lyrics, Jan Zwicky shows us-as she has in her celebrated Lyric Philosophy and the Governor General's award-winning Songs for Relinquishing the Earth-how music means and meaning is musical.
"My great-
grandmother slept
in a boxcar on the night
before she made the crossing. The steel
ended in Sangudo then, there was
no trestle on the Pembina, no siding
on the other side. They crossed
by ferry, and went on by cart through bush,
the same eight miles. Another
family legend has it that she stood there
in the open doorway of the shack
and said, "You told me, Ernest,
it had windows and a floor."
-from "Robinson's Crossing"
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Person
Jan Zwicky is a Canadian philosopher, poet, essayist and musician. Zwicky is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, where she taught both philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities courses from 1996 until 2009. She has served as a faculty member at the Banff Centre Writing Studio, has conducted numerous writing workshops and edits regularly for Brick Books. Zwicky's poetry is featured in a number of anthologies. It deals frequently with music, as well as the natural world, and has often been cited for its intense lyricism. Numerous individual poems have been translated into Czech, French, German, Serbian, Spanish and Italian. Zwicky lives in British Columbia.