With lyrical homage to earth and ocean, Nancy Mackenzie’s poetry in Crisp-Maned Bay pulses through each chamber of our divided hearts with a responsible sense of belonging. The first part, Marble Island, is a paean to the feminine, romance, tragedy, and fate. The poems in this section find fierce joy in calling in the ghosts with their wisdoms and magics. “Crisp-Maned Bay” – three words from The Mabinogion – herein evoke the horse as well as the sea (bay), to be complicit in the poet’s travels through a corridor of time. The second part, The Mermaid’s Tale, turns back time to when the poet learned from Athen’s Pentelic pillars and the soft glow of lantern light in a little Mediterranean village by the sea. In the final part, What We Are Formed by Nature to Bear reveals notes falling/falling notes to pipe us over the threshold into a harvest of ordinary/extraordinary beauty and truth.

Born in Calgary, writer Nancy Mackenzie spent her childhood on a horse ranch in Cochrane, Alberta. A graduate of Acadia University in Nova Scotia, she now resides in Edmonton.

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