Mandorla
(Ronsdale Press, 2005)
ART 108
Motherhood—personal, historical, mythological. Mandorla is all about mothers and children, especially the mothering of challenging children, children with disabilities. In the first section of Nancy Holmes’ new collection of poems, the Virgin Mary is the archetypal suffering mother who worries about the fate of her son. Through a poetic re-drawing of the hieratic poses of icons of the Virgin in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Holmes comes to recognize the fear and absolute love for a child who is fated to be different.
The second section moves out of cultural myth into family history, the Ukrainian side of the poet’s family, people who settled in north-eastern Alberta in the first years of the twentieth century. These poems use images drawn from domestic fairy tales and the family farm, tracking imagined inner lives of immigrant children. Through speculation, magic and distorted family stories, Holmes explores not only the damage of mental disability, cultural displacement and corrosive prejudice, but also the beauty and social isolation of rural Alberta.
In the last section of the book, the author focuses on her own experience of motherhood, its pain and comedy, its bewilderment and bedazzlement, its crushing collisions with schools and social systems. Holmes creates a triptych that opens up some of the emotional and spiritual adventure of being a parent, that most heart-breaking yet enriching of human roles, past or present.
(Description Source: Ronsdale Press)
Author
Nancy Holmes is an associate professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies (FCCS) at UBC Okanagan. She has published six collections of poetry, most recently Arborophobia (University of Alberta Press, 2022) and The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems (Ronsdale Press, 2012), a collection of poems about the place, people, plants, and animals of the Okanagan Valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. Nancy won the 2017 Malahat Review’s Creative Non-Fiction award.
Nancy’s poems, essays and short stories have been published in Canada, the UK, and Ireland. She is the editor of Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009). She teaches Creative Writing and has been both Head of the Department of Creative Studies and the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in FCCS. She also collaborates with communities and other artists on eco art projects both locally and internationally, including the award-winning Border Free Bees project https://borderfreebees.com/.
UBC Library Holdings
How to Purchase this Book
From the Publisher – Ronsdale Press
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri
Paper ISBN: 9781553800293
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