Grid

As we enter this book we come to know the striking and vulnerable northern landscapes that Brenda Schmidt has called home for over two decades. She is a poet who asks difficult questions and is an unselfconscious witness to both the sublime and the darker side of human interaction with nature. She holds up the ways we choose to separate from the environment we depend on for our survival.

In Grid Schmidt's language is both honest and moving as she contemplates this growing separation, yet the poems are intense, insightful and often humorous. What does it mean to live a life "off the grid"? Is it possible to exist intimately with the mysteries of self and nature? Schmidt is aware of the media "spin" that fills our time as if it were a storm, yet in the centre of her poetry is a silent place; to get there you must endure the isolation of the true storm, with eyes wide open, singing. In Grid Brenda Schmidt gives us her best work to date, poetry that is imbued with an insightful force and a lyric urgency.

Brenda Schmidt

Brenda Schmidt is a writer, visual artist, naturalist and active blogger based in Creighton, a mining town on the Canadian Shield in northern Saskatchewan. Brenda grew up on a farm in the Coteau Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan. She has a BA in English from the University of Waterloo. She is a former nurse and has lived in northern Saskatchewan for twenty-six years.

Brenda is the author of three previous books of poetry, A Haunting Sun (Thistledown Press, 2001), More than Three Feet of Ice (Thistledown Press, 2005) and Cantos from Wolverine Creek (Hagios Press, 2008). Her cross-genre book of essays and letter fragments, Flight Calls, is forthcoming from Kalamalka Press in 2012. Brenda was a finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry in 2001, winner of the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry in 2003 and a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for poetry on four occasions.

Blog » birdschmidt.blogspot.ca