Jan Zwicky

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" 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.

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