Fishing Poems

This ground-breaking book by the renowned poet and magazine editor Karen Mulhallen concerns itself with the water, the lakes and the oceans, and the solitary pursuits like fishing which take us back to the beginnings of human life. The further back we go the closer we are to the world of spirits manifesting themselves as natural forms. The book opens on the Baja coast of California. Human beings, native peoples, occupied that coast more than a thousand years ago. White settlers never arrived there until the 16th century. In the desert and on the uninhabited coastline of the Baja one can feel these old forces. In western Mexico in a small fishing village the narrator of these poems meets a man who had sailed down from northern California, basically in an open boat. There was a small cabin. But his experiences of the sea in the narrative of this work tells us how Europeans had come to Ontario, and what must it have been like. And of course the great lakes with their tides and their depths continue that tradition of encounter with the elements. The poems in this collection tell a story, and weave motifs of history and spirituality and their connection to earth, water and fire.