Sign-In
Cart
Walking Upstream
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9781771872706
Publisher: Thistledown Press
Published: Apr 8 2025
Pages: 78
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.10 Width: 5.80 Depth: 7.80
Language: English
A debut poetry collection, both lyrical and surprisingly playful, about overcoming a harsh evangelical upbringing and seeking consolation from the beauty of the natural world.
This collection by the author of three books of nonfiction takes readers into one man's struggle to escape the corrosive effects of a punishing religion. We meet the small, frightened boy afraid of hell-fire and eternal guilt, and decades later, the man kicking free of the habit of self-excoriation.
There is humour in the observation of the antics of birds, especially magpies and other corvids, and profound humility in the struggle to resist a confining culture.
Magpie, I love you more
for your flight and strut
than for your
squawk,
but can't vilify a creature
ten times tougher than I am
and a hell of a lot more handsome.
We walk with the poet-as-flaneur through neighbourhoods and along the river in a small prairie city, observing the incongruities, absurdities, and startling images and sounds of city life. And as the mystic who believes in something far beyond himself, so the beetle he sees on a path is a little Buddha, and the wind and the flowing river are irresistible forces, while a pine teaches him how you move / without going / anywhere.
Also from
Ratzlaff, Lloyd
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Alighieri, Dante
Pitavy, Francois
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback