Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see.

The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment.

Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the first section ends with a long poem, “Clearance,” that depicts the experience of emptying and departing a home – the physicality of a house serving as a vehicle for processing grief. Pearson writes on family trauma, illness, love, and desire with a pervading sense of hauntedness, compressed, lyrical accounts of complex and ambivalent terrain. The impact of a pandemic lurks in the background, and themes of fear run through much of this collection, with poems exploring how we face our fears – or deny and avoid them – and, ultimately, how we grow and adapt.

Through meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death, Pearson reveals the veil between life and death when drawn to its thinnest. Like the hovering falcon depicted in “A Song of Roses,” the poems view the world from above: “if earth is body, and sky – God help us, spirit.”

Miranda Pearson was born in England and moved to Canada in 1991. She received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, where she was poetry editor for Prism international. Pearson has taught creative writing at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Malahat Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Arc, and Prairie Fire. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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