Winner, SK Arts Poetry Award Honouring Anne Szumigalski, 2021
Winner, Regina Public Library Book of the Year Award Honouring Mary Sutherland, 2021
Finalist, High Plains Book Award, 2021
Shortlisted, Saskatchewan Book Awards, Indigenous Peoples' Publishing, 2020
Shortlisted, Saskatchewan Book Awards, Book of the Year, 2020
Longlisted, Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence in Poetry, 2021

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.

Randy Lundy is a member of the Barren Lands (Cree) First Nation. Born in northern Manitoba, he has lived most of his life in Saskatchewan. He has published three previous books, Under the Night Sun, Gift of the Hawk, and Blackbird Song. An award-winning poet, his work has been widely anthologized.
 

Randy Lundy's profile page

• Long-listed, Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence in Poetry
• Winner, SK Arts Poetry Award Honouring Anne Szumigalski
• Short-listed, High Plains Book Award
• Winner, Regina Public Library Book of the Year Award Honouring Mary Sutherland
• Short-listed, Saskatchewan Book Awards, Book of the Year
• Short-listed, Saskatchewan Book Awards, Indigenous Peoples’ Writing

"Dispassionate yet impassioned, stark yet bristling with images, the poems encompass contradiction and expansion." —Arc Poetry Magazine

"Field Notes for the Self is an offering of beauty and depth that will challenge any reader who engages with it." —The Malahat Review

"Lundy’s poems sprawl across the page, many of them prose poems, with the clear, honest tone of Buckowski without Buckowski’s more sordid sensibilities." —Billings Gazette

“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