Other Titles

The White Crow

About the Book

In this new collection, award-winning poet Christine Smart demonstrates again her deep appreciation of natural beauty in its minutest and grandest forms, especially as she experiences it around her home on Salt Spring Island, B.C. Her poems take us under water, along the shore, through forest and garden, to the mountain top, always with close attention to detail and the mindfulness of her Zen practice. Other poems centre on people: her family, especially her mother whose loss she mourns, her lover, neighbours and children.

“Sensual and dynamic, energetic and meditative by turns, Smart’s poems document our uneasy truce with the wild, the cougar spotted at the compost heap, the buck outside the window at night, twelve inches from my face. The collection conveys the spiritual necessity of building—homes, poems, and memories—despite inevitable loss. Read this book for its bravery and its beauty.”
Marlene Goldman

“In Christine Smart’s finely wrought poems, one has the sense of an Intelligence that sifts the world for its gold: she interweaves the precision and splendour of the natural world with acutely perceived narratives which range from the personal to the global. It strikes me that this is the real vocation of the poet—to provide a context and a means of reconciliation for every sorrow and every shiver of beauty.”
Marilyn Bowering

104 pages with cover and interior art work by Jennifer Waelti-Walters

Cover and text design by Frances Hunter.

About the Author

Born in 1953 in Shawville, Quebec, Christine Smart was the youngest of eight children of a farm family. Although her mother handled all the chores expected of a farm wife, she was also a school teacher who ensured that her daughters received higher education and the qualifications for professions beyond housewifery. Christine graduated from Queen’s University with a B.SC.N degree in 1976. After travelling and working in Montreal and Edinburgh she returned to the University of Victoria, where she received a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts, Writing in 1997. Since 1989 she has lived on Salt Spring Island, B.C. where she raised her one daughter and works as the community health nurse. Her first poetry collection Decked and Dancing (Hedgerow Press, 2006) won the Acorn-Plantos Award for poetry accessible to the general reader, naming her “People’s Poet.” Learn more at christinesmart.ca

About the Artist

Jennifer Waelti-Walters is a retired professor of contemporary French literature at the University of Victoria. She is an Associate of the Victoria College of Art, where she studied for three years. She has had a number of exhibitions of her paintings and prints at galleries around the world. She created original prints for the Hedgerow Press publications Reflections on the C-Word (2007) and Apples under Bed (2007). For further information see jwaelti-walters.com

Hedgerow Press: 10876 Madrona Dr, North Saanich BC, V8L 5N9 · Phone: 250-656-9320 · E-Mail: hedgep@telus.net