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Heather Spears, Canadian writer and artist, was educated at the University of British Columbia, The Vancouver School of Art and the University of Copenhagen. She is divorced and has four children. She has lived in Denmark since 1962.

She has held over 80 solo exhibitions and published 11 collections of poetry and three novels of speculative fiction (1991-96), the Moonfall Trilogy.

The Flourish (04), a novel of crime fiction and the family, came out in Canada and was republished in Europe as A Muted Voice (09).

The Creative Eye (07) is the first of a series on visual perception. She has three books of drawings: Drawn from the Fire (89), Massacre (90) and Line by Line (02).

Drawings from the Newborn (86), The Panum Poems (96) and Required Reading (00) contain both poems and full-page drawings.

Her latest collection of poetry, I can still draw (08), was short-listed for the Lowther Memorial Awards. She has illustrated numerous books and articles and also draws courtroom, dance, theatre and childbirth.

Specializing in drawing children, in particular premature and other threatened infants, she travels widely and has drawn in hospitals in the Middle East, Europe and America.

I can still draw

"It's what I hope for, or fear, that resonant line or image that will make it impossible for me to sleep at night, or to breathe easily."
Susan Musgrave, The Sun Saturday Review

Spears is master of the line in poetry, as she is of the pencil line. The language of these poems is never showy, never obscure, but consistently precise and forthright; sensuous but never sentimental.... an intelligent, compassionate engagement with contemporary life....This collection will be seen as a continuation of, and valuable addition to, a mature poet's faithful documentation of her world.
Sarah Klassen, Prairie Fire

No thought is left untold; no position left undisclosed. I could understand returning to this book throughout one’s life, which is the mark of a true classic. It actually stopped me mid-poem sometimes, to put down the book for a moment and fully feel what the author had done... saying the most with the fewest words. No poetic flourishes but razor sharp poetics.
Press release, Pat Lowther Awards Jury 2008 .

The soft room

At Saanich police station
they've set aside a room –
"Normally," a sergeant says, "there's stuffed animals
there's a love seat
it's used to interview children
in cases of child abuse
It's known as the soft room"
a love seat
normally
the video is bad the black
machine swivelled at the judge so that the tiny heads
of mother and girl enlongate, dull curtains a lot
of static and flack
and now the prosecutor lifts her arm, aims the remote
fast forwards while the sleeve
of her gown widens and after a silence
the inanimate voices resume,
one childish one a man's
hours of it
"You are being charged
with murder do you understand?"
This is the soft room
"I didn't do anything.
I wanna go home."
This is normally.

Read More:

http://www.heatherspears.com/contents/required.htm

Phil Hall has published 12 books of poems, 9 chapbooks, & 1 cassette. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published in 1973. Among his other titles are A Minor Operation (1984), Old Enemy Juice (1988), The Unsaid (1992), and Hearthedral—A Folk-Hermetic (1996). His Trouble Sleeping was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2001.

In 2005, Brick Books (celebrating 20 years as Hall’s publisher) published An Oak Hunch, which was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006.

He has taught writing and literature at the Kootenay School of Writing, York University, Ryerson Polytechnical University, and many colleges. He has been poet-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, Sage Jill Writing Experience in Saskatchewan, The Berton House in Dawson City and elsewhere. In fall, 2007, BookThug published Hall’s long poem, White Porcupine, and also a revised second edition of his essay/poem, The Bad Sequence. In fall 2009, from Beautiful Outlaw Press, Ghost Gum, a hand-sewn chapbook, part of a deluxe set of 6 in a slipcover was released. Other chapbooks in the set are by Erín Moure, Angela Carr, Oana Avasilichioaei, Jay MillAr, & Mark Goldstein. This spring, 2010, Pedlar Press will publish The Little Seamstress, edited by Erín Moure. Phil lives near Perth, Ontario.


Sent For Mint


To pace a pleasing moiety-line

in my brown fedora at dusk in the rain

as I search by our dock for a red stem


the raccoons have dug up the turtle eggs

but not tipped over Manny's empty ashes-urn

many before us here wrote as wide & wild


Jean Joan Matt McKay Sliter Al Robb

ornate or silly up these draw-road watersheds

they were the daughters of hockey players

(stupid chickens / fried egg sandwiches)


Amy Michael Cohen Finnegan Don Kim

of course that rubber stamp of Dürer's rhino

came down on volumes of exiled theory-song

& even the Dalmatian wore a wife-beater t-shirt


Murray Dorothy Wallace Stan Havelock

sunken log barns incubated early styles

lots severed / dams imploded / sap rang

originals & imitations played euchre


despite these gnat-swarms this poison ivy

algae bloom zebra mussels

mosquitoes deer-flies the OPP firing range

increased traffic on Murphy's Pt Rd


we flaunt a small town bulk foods happiness

after those difficult city years / ripping money

& kicking the cobbler's bench over


smell this wild quick tang on my fingers

an invitation like this has ended a poem before


some comfort in knowing that grows


*


It can't be October


in the stove I burn old New Yorkers

(but always save the William Steig covers)


lake light quavers

cleaning as it again mulls over

the smoke-darkened Rene de Braux painting


Chris benisoned walls with / now I get to

A man with a cattle-gad on each shoulder

half-way / no hurry / a Roman bridge

(double arches / quick weed-hints)


a stuccoed villa set in along a hillside

Ann has taken the Wolf River apples down to Margaret 92

mornings I try to read page-shaped ash

a quote my fire preserves all night

from columns it has only one use for now

riven by passion, not profit. We continue.