Andrea MacPherson

Natural Disasters, my first collection of poetry, will be available this July.  The collection has been a long time coming – it was completed in 2001, originally to be published in the fall of 2003, and now has a new, lovely home with Palimpsest Press – and I am thrilled to finally have it out in the world.  

Please feel free to attend the Launch – August 16, 2007 at Whitby’s Bookstore in White Rock, BC.

 George McWhirter, Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, says of the collection:

This book captures the core of Andrea MacPherson’s Scots-Irish-Canadian heritage, where even spite is a delight and dread, delight and devotion all feed on the lush BC criss-cross of cedar cloak on tartan and saffron lines.

 Stephanie Bolster, Governor General award winning poet, says:

MacPherson knows where desire and grief, inextricably bound, lodge in the body and she knows that language can awaken memory to make ‘wings beat against the chest’.  In Natural Disasters, the chest is pulled open to show the wings inside.

I attended the Michael Ondaatje reading last night at Christ Church Cathedral with my friend, Jane Silcott.  The venue was amazing – stained glass, hurricane lamps, beams – and the conversation between Michael Ondaatje and Hal Wake even better.  I’m really looking forward to finishing Divisadero, and thankful to Ondaatje for saying that he never writes from an outline (neither do I!).  A memorable moment with Hal Wake: rephrasing an audience query to contain the phrase new tenants move into your head.