In her third collection of poems, Sue Wheeler writes of the ephemeral with an eye trained on the eternal questions. "Who are you?" she asks at the outset of her search for fresh and more telling names for the human in the lush natural landscape of her West Coast island home. The answers she gives us are always surprising.

Understory

To walk out of the field guide
and listen. To wait
for the world to approach with its dapple and hands.
Who are you?
Dreamer On A Short String.
Big Boots Clomping Through The Underbrush.
There's an understory here, shades
of meaning, tale told by a rock
signifying everything.

To open the grammar of being seen
and let the creatures name you.
Lover Who Begins To Notice.
Figure Of Speech.

Wheeler names for us this place she knows intimately, where, despite its natural wealth, human sorrows grow as abundantly as the rich flora of the forest understory. She takes us down and into the riches of the moment, until the green on green of resplendent existence becomes an extension of our most essential selves.

Born and raised in Texas, Sue Wheeler now lives on Lasqueti Island, off the British Columbia coast. She is a past winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Memorial Award and of the 1994 Malahat Long Poem competition. Her first book of poems, Solstice on the Anacortes Ferry, won the Kalamalka Press New Writers Award. Kristjana Gunnars called that book "an amazing journey around the physical as well as the emotional world."

Sue Wheeler's profile page

"Place, then, is the point of departure for these proficient poems about nature and "the natural," these playful poems that ask us not only to look again at where we live, but how and why ... [the poems] have a bite to them, piquancy, and spice."--Alison Pick, The Globe and Mail