Kirjahaku

An exquisite series of meditations on memory, evanescence and the land. Randy Lundy draws deeply from his Cree heritage and equally from European and Asian traditions. Readers will be reminded by turns of Simon Ortiz, PÓr Lagerkvist, and Jane Hirshfield. This is the mind of prayer, a seeing and re-seeing of the immense cyclic beauty of the earth. "Lundy has entered the place where the masters reside. His poems join the shades that walk among them. There aren't many people who get to that place and sometimes it can feel very lonely there, but the masters are saved by the brilliant and humble work they have done, their poems the crevices in our lives where the light shines through." -- Patrick Lane, author of Washita "Randy Lundy's poems bring forward the spirit of his Cree ancestry, and place our species humbly among the creatures of Earth—who are all observed with deep reverence and perceptive care." -- Don McKay, author of Strike/Slip "This is the book of poems I've been waiting for … His poems burn us, feed us, and make us feel beloved even if we have been broken. Language, as he uses it, holds us and leads us to a place where we can mourn and pray and wonder." -- Lorna Crozier, author of What the Soul Doesn't Want

Field Notes for the Self is a series of dark meditations: spiritual exercises in which the poem becomes a forensics of the soul. The poems converse with Patrick Lane, John Thompson, and Charles Wright, but their closest cousins may be Arvo Pärt's tintinnabulations—overlapping structures in which notes or images are rung slowly and repeatedly like bells. The goal is freedom from illusion, freedom from memory, from "the same old stories" of Lundy's violent past; and freedom, too, from the unreachable memories of the violence done to his Indigenous ancestors, which, Lundy tells us, seem to haunt his cellular biology. Rooted in exquisitely modulated observations of the natural world, the singular achievement of these poems is mind itself, suspended before interior vision like a bit of crystal twisting in the light. "Dispassionate yet impassioned, stark yet bristling with images, the poems encompass contradiction and expansion." — Arc Poetry Magazine Praise for Randy Lundy: "Here is a poet of whom one can say—quietly, simply, with gratitude—that highest of praises: the real thing." — Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty "Randy Lundy has entered the place where the masters reside…" — Patrick Lane, author of Washita

Something for the Dark centres Indigenous knowledge to probe the limits of what we know, confront the unknown, and reckon with our place in the world. Randy Lundy's newest collection of poetry--the final in a trilogy that began with Blackbird Song and continued with Field Notes for the Self--turns his poems toward our relationships with the land, animals, and people, showing how our failures to see and live by the personhood of all other beings in the world, human and non-human, leads inevitably to heartbreak. As Lundy's poems accumulate like snow on cedar, his recounting of experiences that transcend language invites the reader to bend their understanding and notice what was once unseen--how a red-winged blackbird clings to a swaying reed, how mist rises after rainfall, how dogs keen and howl, how fingers taste bitter after lighting sage, how hunger smarts, how liquor burns, and how the pain survivors carry is not merely their own.