Books published by Goose Lane Editions

The Golden Thread introduces Claire Delaney, an ambitious, idealistic and highly rational young woman called to be a nun. In these eleven stories, readers hear the joy of praise, feel the itch of stockings and habit, taste the gall of obedience, and, finally, share the pain and delight when Claire renounces her vows and embraces the secular life.

Lumberman Larry Gorman was no respecter of borders -- nor of anything else, it seems. From the time he was a young lad growing up on Prince Edward Island until his death in Brewer, Maine, in 1917, Larry Gorman composed satirical songs about friend and foe, relative and stranger, without fear or favour. Larry Gorman: The Man Who Made the Songs was first published nearly thirty years ago. In this new edition of this celebrated book, Edward D. Ives tells the story of the songwriter as he followed his lumberman's trade from Prince Edward Island to the Miramichi and Maine. Meticulously researched and thoroughly documented, this biography features more than 70 of Gorman's folk lyrics, 26 with musical annotations.

One Indian Summer is a powerful and eloquent novel about a boy whose coming-of-age on the Miramichi River coincides with the death of his father and the end of the family farm.

A new book by M. Travis Lane is something to celebrate. In her latest collection, Temporary Shelter, she demonstrates that she is indeed one of Canada's finest and most rigorous poets. Writing from a decidedly feminist perspective, M. Travis Lane resists any easy attempt to order a universe of apparently conflicting patterns. Celebrating the open against the enclosed, the imagination against things tidily nailed down, the poems in this collection form separate illuminations. As Lane writes in the introduction to this important volume, an image is not an equation, but as Robert Frost suggests, a temporary shelter against the confusion of experiences.

The process of discovering home is ongoing. The past is raked as carefully as a sand garden, for memories not tended faithfully will slip away. Each moment is sifted, held and relived. In Resisting the Anomie, Kwame Dawes celebrates his roots and holds them fast. A Ghanaian-born Jamaican, educated in Canada and living in the US, Dawes writes tightly controlled poems, wild and free poems, boisterous reggae songs; poems of faith, love, anger and humour. All offer glimpses into the poet's true home.

During John Thompson's all-too-brief lifetime, he completed only two volumes of poetry, At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets and Stilt Jack, but seldom has such a slim oeuvre supported such a large reputation. In these remarkable poems, Thompson seeks out the darkest places of the heart and floods them with light. Confessionally raw, oblique and beautiful, Thompson's poetry -- and in particular, his experiments in Stilt Jack with adapting the ghazal. A poetic form with Persian and Arabian origins -- has influenced three generations of poets. This revised and updated edition of John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations, edited and introduced by Peter Sanger, gathers together all of Thompson's mature work, including not only his two books, but also previously uncollected poetry and Thompson's haunting translations of several of his French Canadian contemporaries and the great French poet René Char.

In "The Golden Thread," Ann Copeland's last book of stories, Claire Delaney emerged from her convent after eleven years as a nun. That book won Copeland a place as a finalist for the 1990 Governor General's Award for fiction.Now, in the linked stories in "Strange Bodies on a Stranger Shore," Copeland takes Claire into the complicated territory of middle age. As her oldest son starts college, Claire revisits her young self, when she followed the call to religious life and later the mature knowledge that she must leave it.Moving between the present and the past, Claire steers a tricky path among midlife joys and responsibilities, from the grace of "Another Christmas," to the physical intensity of "Leaving the World," to the angry, provisional resolution of "Rupture."

Fast on the heels of his widely acclaimed comic novel, The South Will Rise at Noon, Douglas Glover has produced a stunning volume of stories which breaks all the fictional moulds. In this new collection, Glover introduces an astonishing array of characters who inhabit a world which is wayward yet full of marvels, from an 18th-century pioneer who believes he is being persecuted by witches to a born-again Christian from Kentucky who loses his memory and ends up finding true love in glitzy Bel Air. Whether contemplating the mystic Worm of Ouroboros or the colours of Alabama's Gulf coast, he infuses his writing with energy, exuberant imagery and amazing turns of thought.

Set in Scotland against the expanding shadow of revolutionary terror and war, this epistolary novel by Keith Harrison is the story of the idealists of the French Revolution, the romantics who set out for the New World, and the Scots who were forced into British service during the Napoleonic War. Opening with correspondence between Gavin and Mary, Eyemouth rings with authenticity, revealing its characters through their own lowland Scots dialect. From the letters of Nessie, a servant girl who writes about the goings-on of her "laird and lady," to those of Jimmy, a munitions manufacturer from Edinburgh, to the missives of Mary's headstrong daughter, who disguises herself as a young man to search for her father in the New World, Eyemouth revels in the vagaries of a society caught on the edge of cataclysmic world events. A novel about exile, lost love, and the betrayal of idealism, depicting the lives of its characters with vividness and surprising detail.

Henry Alline was a self-educated 18th-century evangelist who spent most of his life as a saddle-bag preacher in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. A tireless traveller and speaker, he nonetheless managed to write a number of significant theological works which have provided the inspiration for the title poem in this collection.

In this his first collection of stories, George Little examines the lives of parents, siblings, friends and politicians, offering fleeting glimpses into the moral complexity of contemporary relationships. In the title story, "The Many Deaths of George Robertson," a man rediscovers himself by rewriting his past; in "Marooned," an old woman is haunted by the memory of a shipwreck and her lost child; in "The Beauty of Holiness," a leather-bound book evokes memories of a man's boyhood relationship with his strict Presbyterian grandmother. Throughout these stories, George Little probes the gathering storm of moral dilemma where indecision is illuminated by flashes of astonished laughter.

W.J. Keith is well-known to fans of Canadian literature as an editor, scholar and critic. Over the last twenty years, he has written about the work of many Canadian poets, gaining a reputation as a demanding arbiter of Canadian literature. Now for the first time in his career, Keith brings together a substantial collection of his own poetry for this masterful volume. Taking memory as its main subject, Echoes in Silence explores the poet's memory of his native England; of his wartime childhood; of words, language and God; and of Proust, the quintessential spokesman of memory.

Pat Jasper collects memories and transforms them into insights. In The Outlines of Our Warm Bodies, she focuses on the "small close spaces" of the family -- on domestic relationships, crises and patterns, on coming to terms with time and its power to destroy and to heal. Whether inspired by incidents -- a pulled hamstring, breast reduction surgery, the death of a parent -- or by objects infused with emotion -- a grocery list left behind, the outline of angels in the snow -- Jasper demonstrates a remarkably strong narrative voice, excelling as a story-teller who carefully unravels the yarn of a woman's life.

If you've never heard of fricot or poutine râpée, it's not surprising. You won't find these words in most French dictionaries or in traditional French cookbooks. But travel thorugh what was once Acadie and you'll discover that these savory dishes are a central part of an original North American French cuisine. In A Taste of Acadie, Marielle Cormier-Boudreau and Melvin Gallant take their readers on a culinary tour of Acadie, sampling dishes from the Gaspé Peninsula to Cape Breton, from the northern tip of Prince Edward Island to the Magdalen Islands. Here you'll be encouraged to savour a hearty pot-en-pot or one of dozens of variations on the meat pie (called pâte à la viande by the Acadians). The adventurous will want to sample pâte à la râpure with a crust made of grated potatoes or the ever-popular poutine râpée, one of the few French dishes to survive the transition to the New World. For those with a sweet tooth, Cormier-Boudreau and Gallant feature desserts which use maple syrup and fresh wild berries including favourites such as poutines à trou, a tart mixture of cranberries, nuts and apples in a sweet pastry sleeve, and pets de soeurs, a simple biscuit with a puckered middle and a spicy Acadian name. Complete with information on the many natural ingredients favoured by the Acadians and now available in many city markets, A Taste of Acadie offers a delectable glimpse of a unique culinary tradition.

Nancy Bauer has the ability to create some of the most memorable female characters in contemporary literature. For Samara the Wholehearted, she has written a coming-of-age story, centred around Samara, an imaginative young woman whose maturity is marked by an impulsive examination of the inner life. A profoundly religious writer with a lively interest in Eastern spirituality, Bauer transports her readers in this novel to the slightly tilted world of Summerland, a communal summer retreat. Here she introduces Samara, her perpetually adolescent half-brother Fred, a disabled genius named Marty and a host of off-beat characters who form an unusual extended family in a world filled with marvel. Mixing rarefied prose with the traditional techniques of story-telling and post-modern innovation, Bauer produces a novel which is both technically adept and intensely memorable.

For Brian Bartlett, a gesture, a dream, a co-incidence or an inexplicable bit of synchronicity can lead to a poem. In Planet Harbor, he has put together a collection of poems with a strong narrative line which draws upon experiences as diverse as a bus driver's salute, the dreams of a forty-year-old batboy, a bus ride towards Jerusalem, or a performance by Canuck fiddlers in Nagasaki.

In Rooms: Milongas for Prince Arthur Street, Trujillo revives the floating images of his past to understand and reflect upon the circumstances of his present life. He remembers his mother hanging clothes on the line to dry, meditates upon cockroaches or the streets of a new and unknown city, and muses upon the paradoxes of love and death -- all with a tough, but graceful humour.

In the Flight of Stars, Dorothy Roberts's seventh book of poetry and her first in more than a decade, is -- in her own words -- " a collection of latter-life poems," the mature work of a firm intelligence. No sentimentalist, Roberts unflinchingly confronts the polarities of birth and death, decay and renewal, the gradual passage of light, the forces of dissolution, the patterns and requirements of nature. Growing old, she observes the pleasures of age and the interwoven pattern of loss. Like the best of her earlier work, In the Flight of Stars demonstrates Roberts's ease with language, her preference for meter and movement, her interest in subtle variations of sound and her ability to combine idea and metaphor. The result is a signifcant collection of verse which is formal without being austere; muscular yet singularly delicate and sensuous.

In this his first collection of stories, Bradd Burningham displays an uncanny ability to inhabit the minds of his narrators, whether earthy, middle-aged women or an adolescent boy on the brink of sexual awakening. The result is a volume of stories at once intensely personal and elusively exotic. A startling beginning for a new writer.

In this her second book of poems, Patience Wheatley reflects upon her experience with the Canadian Women's Army Corps -- exploring her own coming-of-age and offering an historical testament to to the Canadian women who joined the Corps in World War II. The discipline of army drill "recalling crunching patterns / made by our feet on parade ground gravel / to sharp words of command" becomes in memory a time "when once we did it together and perfectly" -- an image of fulfillment both spiritual and sexual. A young girl's romanticism is later transformed, after marriage and children, to the "blessed revelation" that "love is / the predicate." Rich with sentiment, Wheatley's poems are never sentimental, but enlivened by honesty and wit.

His father was a magician; his mother trained white doves. A native of Saint John, N.B., Russ Whitebone grew up in the colourful world of the Big Top and the vaudeville stage, often sleeping in a wardrobe trunk while his parents performed. He soon found his own place in the spotlight. Showman is Russ Whitebone's own story. It follows his career from the carnival circuit of the 1920's -- when he performed as "Baby Russell, World's Youngest Trapeze Artiste" -- through the war years in Europe, where he travelled as an Army Show ventriloquist and comedian. His reminiscences are rich with detail and anecdote, conjuring a world that has all but vanished. The concluding chapters of Showman make it clear that even in partial retirement Russ Whitebone sustains the good humour, vitality and keen enthusiasm which have enabled him to bring pleasure to so many.

Ever since the CBC Anthology programme featured Yvonne Trainer's "Manyberries" poems while she was still an undergraduate, her work has attracted readers and listeners to a new and distinctive voice. The interests of these poems are intensely human: the observations acute; the language deceptively simple, forged from common speech. Trainer is close to her audience -- a wonderful performer of her work -- and makes memorable the drama of everyday events, a poetry of confirmation, of shared surprise and wonder. Drawing from her roots in Alberta prairie life, she is also a directly autobiographical poet, capable of rendering places and people with special attention, often from the wise perspective of a child. In Landscape Turned Sideways poems from Trainer's three previously published collections are brought together with recent work, offering readers a representative volume of her first decade as a published poet.

A Hinge of Spring is Patience Wheatley's first published collection of poetry, though her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Mamashee, Contemporary Verse II, Quarry, Origins, Grain, Northern Light and Event. She has also published a number of short stories, including the much-noted "Mr. Mackenzie King" in the anthology Fiddlehead Greens (;Oberon, 1979);. The forty-three poems of A Hinge of Spring are assured and confident in tone, and while their geographic locations are scattered there is little sense of the merely occasional. Wheatley's writing is characterized by a powerful imaginative intelligence in which literary associations and the response to immediate experience work together.

History with a difference! Fit to Print is history written by people who were actually there, who learned at first hand of the scandals and barbaric cruelties and incidents of mirt hand misery. Often the story is told by witnesses, or by victims of the great fires, near famines, and outbreaks of disease which ravaged the daily lives of our forefathers. Fit to Print peeks behind the curtains of past events, giving quick glimpses of the real lives of real people. It gathers information that seems to find no place in conventional histories. There are the odd and eccentric items. No other history tells us that in 1812 Elizabeth (Beard) Hopkins had six sons in the famous 104th Regiment, or that in 1848 it was illegal to beat a carpet or a mat in Fredericton, except a doormat, and only before 8 a.m., or that in 1871 a Calais baseball team defeated St. Stephen 80 to 63 (which no one found remarkable), or that in 1910 Auguste Belliveau of Moncton set a record when he was arrested for bootlegging thirteen times in one day. But there are also many entries which warn us against believing in "the good old days" of the past. Racism, sexism, religious bigotry flourished. There were black slaves in New Brunswick; many women lived harsh and vulnerable lives; battles between Catholics and Protestants brought death and maimings. The Ku Klux Klan was active in the province. Justice was often rough and punishments savage, with very young children sent to prison. And corruption thrived in politics. This book offers only a sampler of the rich social history of New Brunswick. But it avoids the endless debates about Confederation, railways and tariffs, and presents instead in its rich variety the daily matters that our ancestors found interesting and that their publications found Fit to Print.

Tiger in the Skull makes available for the first time in a single volume the range, substance, and variety of Lochhead's work.