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Poetry Canadian

Culverts Beneath the Narrow Road

by (author) Brenda Schmidt

Publisher
Thistledown Press
Initial publish date
May 2018
Category
Canadian, Nature, Women Authors
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771871549
    Publish Date
    May 2018
    List Price
    $20.00

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Description

A culvert anchors a key scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The 39 Steps and a scene in Two for the Road starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Culverts appear in books by Tony Burgess, Dennis Cooley, Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, and Virginia Woolf. Culverts called to Brenda Schmidt’s imagination as well. As a child she played in and around their steel dark openings and took risks. In the daring poetry and prose of Culverts Beneath the Narrow Road the risk-taking continues. In her journeys, she asked people from all walks of life — construction workers, farmers, biologists, writers, musicians — about their culvert stories. Their recollections of experiences with or near culverts, both dark and light, gave voice to her own experiences, providing another sense of the connections we share and the way stories emerge and flow. Schmidt does this by using the stories as a jumping off point when they call up her own memories. She expands on interview quotes, stretching and bending them to create new stories and poems.

About the author

Brenda Schmidt, is a writer, visual artist, naturalist and active blogger based in Creighton, a mining town on the Canadian Shield in northern Saskatchewan. Brenda grew up on a farm in the Coteau Hills of southwest Saskatchewan. She has a BA in English, from the University of Waterloo. Schmidt is the author of three previous books of poetry, A Haunting Sun (Thistledown Press, 2001), More Than Three Feet Of Ice (Thistledown Press, 2005) and Cantos from Wolverine Creek (Hagios Press, 2008). Her cross-genre book of essays and letter fragments, Flight Calls, is forthcoming from Kalamalka Press in 2012 as part of the Mackie Lecture and Reading Series. Brenda was finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry in 2001, winner of the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry in 2003 and a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for poetry on four occasions.

Brenda Schmidt's profile page

Excerpt: Culverts Beneath the Narrow Road (by (author) Brenda Schmidt)

The far culvert failed a couple years back thanks to a flood, I think, and now points upward at the same angle as the Air Farce chicken cannon. That comparison dates me, I know. I don’t know what causes the rust. That morning, like most winter mornings, a crowd of cattails wearing toques of snow stood next to the culverts, so the water quality can’t be too bad, though I have no idea what cattails can tolerate. Their stems might carry the rust all the way up to their heads. I could almost feel the fuzz as we drove by. On days that cold a cattail feels like a lint brush, but the temperature was expected to rise 10 degrees by midafternoon. Stroke it then, eyes closed, and you would

 

 

 

feel once more

 

the velvet

 

dress I

 

wore

 

as a girl.

 

 

 

With my forehead against the passenger side window, I pictured Alice Munro doing the same, her forehead melting the frost, her eyes taking everything into the darkness and sending it forth with a rush into the light. Such brilliance. I’d been thinking about her and her work a lot since she won the prize. Imagine what she could do with this place. The off-kilter culvert, the road with the arm to keep us out, the mining complex beyond, the smokestack standing there like it had too much Viagra

 

 

 

all on

 

top of the Canadian

 

Shield whose

 

curves are covered

 

with the usual

 

lofty

 

blanket of snow.

 

 

 

— from “Culverts beneath the Narrow Road Through the Deep North and Other Travel Stretches”

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