Stones to Harvest / Escarmouches de la Chair
Stones to Harvest/Escarmouches de la Chair, a lyrical cycle of 47 poems, sets out the four seasons in remarkable and very concrete images drawn from the flora and fauna of Eastern Ontario and Southern Quebec, where Beissel lived and worked. He explores these landscapes with remarkable specificity, though his approach is universal in scope and embodied in a language that consistently aspires to song. A bilingual French/English edition.
Henry Beissel is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, translator and editor with well over 30 books published. Among his 23 collections of poetry are his epic Seasons of Blood and the lyrical Stones to Harvest. As a playwright he came to international fame with Inuk and the Sun, which premiered at the Stratford Festival in 1982 and has been translated into many languages and produced internationally. His most recent books of poetry include Fugitive Horizons, which engages the world of modern science; his celebration of our land and its people in Cantos North, which was republished in a bilingual English/French edition for the 150th anniversary of Canada. Henry is Distinguished Emeritus Professor at Concordia University (Montreal) where he taught English Literature for thirty years and founded a flourishing Creative Writing Program. He now lives with his wife, Arlette Francière, the painter and literary translator, in Ottawa.
