Treading Fast Rivers

When fireflies write love letters we step carefully, for the smallest lights capture us most securely - the fireflies held low by the winds all along the coastal barrens. If we were to trap affection in a shell it would fail to flicker but along this vast cliff-edge we could read love letters by the phosphorescence - if words were equal to the trail of stars, the strewn lights of hard-winged beetles.This collection of linked poems takes us on a journey where angels ride bicycles, wounds both grieve and heal, and 'our will / diving through the shuddering / wet world, carries us'. Resonant with 'a longing so ardent and spacious', these are poems of place and displacement, sickness and health. A poet of striking maturity, Eleonore Schonmaier writes of icy depths and serene pools with equal ease. Unflinching when charting the terrains of human nature and the natural wilderness, she travels to such far-flung landscapes as Crete and Portugal, and the watery depths of the Sargasso Sea. Closer to home she looks beneath the surface of Northern mining communities and explores an abandoned lighthouse on the Atlantic coast. Eleonore Schonmaier is a writer living in Ketch Harbour, Nova Scotia.