Bøger af Jane Spavold Tims

mnemonic is a book of precisely worded and carefully phrased poems that carry the reader on a journey through the soundscapes of the author's home terrain-rural New Brunswick. Jane Tims, botanist, land use planner, and environmental conservationist, employs her keen observation and well-honed writing skills to portray the sounds that populate meadow and forest, emerge along lakes and rivers, and typically occur in domestic terrains. Birdsong commands primary attention and flows like a canopy across each section of this book. Jane shares her drawings of birds, which add the image of form to the aura of music. An orchestra of other surrounding sounds prompt the author's poetic rendering, revealing a world chock-full of interesting information for those alert to its resonance. mnemonic offers a doorway in which to first stand, and then engage a journey from poem to poem into the author's immersive experience of the great world's soundscapes and birdsong.

We live in a time when built landscape is often in a state of abandonment - old churches, old bridges, old schools, old buildings in general. Add to this abandoned vehicles, abandoned boats and deteriorating stone walls, grown-up roads and decommissioned rail lines, and we exist in a landfill of twentieth century projects, abandoned to time. These poems listen to the histories and stories of the abandoned. The poems are sometimes sad, sometimes resentful, always wise.

The Grinning Tun is a sea shell, plucked from the sands of a faraway tropical shore. But this is a sea shell with a difference. It will not stay put. Shove it in the warming oven and, next morning, it sits on top of the stove. Bury it in the ground and it is found in the root cellar. And it grins. It thinks of the possibilities.In the 1990s, Kaye Eliot comes to Acadia Creek to spend a quiet summer with her two children. But instead of passing stress-free days of swimming and hiking, she finds herself embedded in mystery after mystery. A missing vagrant and a gang of thieves have the community worried. Neighbours seem determined to occupy all of Kaye's time and energy in restoration of an old flower garden. To add to the mayhem, Kaye and her kids have stumbled on a century-old legend of a treasure buried on the property, a packet of forgotten letters from a woman named Maria and an old map of the garden. And they dig up a sinister sea shell. A sea shell who looks like a grinning skull and will not stay where he is put. Can Kaye recover her calm or will she be the victim of neighbors, vagrants, thieves and a shell called the Grinning Tun? Restoring Maria's garden seems a great idea, until Kaye discovers how Maria's garden grew.

When August arrives, I always remember the summers of my childhood when I visited my grandfather's farm in Nova Scotia. It was a place of rambles, exploration and discovery. I looked forward to returning there each year, to reconnect with the farm and my extended family, especially my cousins. I was a city kid and loved the country life, picking berries, tramping hay and playing in the hay mow.My grandfather's farm was part of a small community including my aunts and uncles, and, of course, the cousins. These were families who depended on the forests, fields and lakes for their livelihood. Food was mostly local, grown on the farm or gathered from the fields and woods.The farm was like a community itself, a miniature village of buildings-the main house, the big barn and various out-buildings, each with its own purpose and its own sights, sounds, smells, tastes and stories.These poems and drawings explore those buildings, summer life on the farm and the gradual changes to farm life over the years.

Waterfalls can be a charming element of landscape. Their beauty and roar fill our senses and inspire poetry and song. Waterfalls can also be dangerous places, symbolic of dramatic change and vulnerability. These are poems that weave together the loveliness of the waterfall and the relentless, even savage, power of falling water. The poems work together to tell the story of love found, love gone wrong and love discarded and mourned. The story is told in part through imagined waterfalls associated with Dante's Inferno and the grotesque character of architectural gargoyles. The beauty of waterfalls is inspired by some of New Brunswick's many natural waterfalls.

When Kaye and her friend Clara hold a yard sale, they never dream a box of old post cards will send them on a search for a valuable artifact, a 'stone.' With the help of stone mason, Daniel, Kaye's family will try to solve the messages in the post cards and find an old house where the lost artifact must be hidden. When Katie's pet, Cow, gets lost in the woods, Kaye's family gets a sudden boost in the game of 'who finds the stone.' Their efforts are stymied by some new arrivals in the community: the determined member of an Irish Heritage Association, a bird watcher who doesn't seem to know a robin from a starling and Daniel's new, rather unlikely, apprentice. Where is the 'stone' and how can it save a community from loss of everything they hold dear?

The unusual thing about in the shelter of the covered bridge is the unity of focus the poet-artist-biologist has achieved with this book. While each element of the book has its own narrative stance, the poems, the drawings, and the natural history notes come together in a way that has an appealing and satisfying unity for ear, eye, and mind.Jane is not a poet who puts all her aesthetic eggs in one basket. She moves easily between modes of expression. She is a connoisseur of land and life, an emissary for the intertwining stories of natural history and human culture.Readers attracted by the poems and drawings pick up a good deal of natural and cultural history as well. Readers attracted to the natural and cultural history have their knowledge graced with the sounds of wind and water, and with the images of plants and animals that live "in the shelter of the covered bridge."With her poetic, artistic, and research skills steering the ship, Jane is now sailing out once again into the geographic by-ways and cultural history of the province. She has a similar book project under way on the environments and cultural settings of one-room schoolhouses.I have no doubt she will offer up another voyage for ear, eye, and mind, and that we will again be culturally enriched by her inspiration and good efforts.