Poets Talking Nature

Harry Thurston is one of Atlantic Canada's premier nature and environmental writers, and also one of the region's finest poets. Thurston has collaborated with New Brunswick poet and songwriter-musician Allan Cooper on their new book and poetic conversation, 'The Deer Yard.' Cooper has played a key role in the region's literary scene as founder of Owl's Head Press and editor of Germination magazine.

Thurston and Cooper will read from 'The Deer Yard' on Monday, September 22 at 7:30 pm in UPEI's Faculty Lounge, SDU Main Building. The pair will also read on Tuesday, September 23 at 7:00 pm in the Summerside Rotary Library. These readings are organized by the UPEI English Department, with funding from The Canada Council for the Arts.

In 2009, Thurston was writer-in-residence on Vancouver Island in the heritage site home of renowned fisherman and environmentalist Roderick Haig-Brown. While there, he and longtime friend Cooper, on the east coast, embarked on a poetic dialogue about the natural world. They followed the model of the Wang River Sequence, a poetic correspondence by the Chinese poets Wang Wei and P'ei Ti over 1,200 years ago.

'Our poetry, separately, has always been rooted deeply in the natural world,' said Thurston. 'Like many other Western poets, we have looked to the East, to classical Chinese poetry, as one model to best express our relationship with what we now call the environment, a no less reverential term than Nature.'

Thurston's most recent non-fiction work, 'The Atlantic Coast: A Natural History' won the 2011 Lane Anderson Award. Cooper's recent musical projects include Rosedale and Songs for a Broken World.

For information:
Dr. Richard Lemm
Professor, Department of English
Winter's Tales Authors' Reading Series
(902) 566-0592, rlemm@upei.ca