Birch Split Bark
Diane Guichon
Author: Diane Guichon | ISBN: 0889712158 : 9780889712157 | Format: Paperback | Size: 140 x 200mm | Pages: 100 | Weight: .138 Kg. Published: Harbour Publishing (Nightwood Editions) – November 2007 | Availability: In Print | Subjects: Works by individual poets: from c1900-: Canada
In her debut collection of poems, Birch Split Bark
Diane Guichon uses a quintessentially Canadian image — a birch bark canoe — to speak of those private waters that make us universally human. By writing in the first person of a father, a mother, a son and a daughter, she bridges age to gender, myth to memory and hatred to reconciliation. These poems are brave and brilliantly voiced and her descriptions are as haunting as a loon’s concerto on a silent summer lake. Guichon’s characters speak to the plurality of Canadian identity; in four distinct voices, Guichon pulls apart the myths that have created us and continue to dictate who we must be. Birch Split Bark proves that canoes will always write history upon their waters just as poets will write humanity upon the page.