In her debut collection, Slide, Barbara Myers plays with the eternal present, the nunc stans, taking us through time and space, over three continents, where people, places and events continue to co-exist in memory and in the body. "Instructions for the Era of Water" is the opening poem in a series focusing on the mysteries of change, evanescence and renewal. Here, where "the sea has taken its place leaning against the wall," Myers contemplates "floating settlements" and "amphibious houses." In another poem, a family takes summer swims while soldiers train across the river in Petawawa for duty in Afghanistan. Other poems explore science, cats and paradox -- even the curse of corn on genetic modifiers. By turns playful and sober, the poems in these pages, which represent and distill ten years' work, spring from experiences in Ottawa -- its storied Lowertown where the author now lives -- and Halifax, where part of her remains, while also taking in the communities in between, and the Ocean Limited, that crosses salt marshes back and forth into the peninsula of Nova Scotia. Whether in form, near-form, or free form, these are poems with an ear to sound and the music of language, accessible and seamlessly crafted.
About the Author: Barbara Myers grew up in Halifax's North End, and worked at odd jobs to help put herself through school. She was a reporter for the Halifax Mail-Star and Chronicle-Herald and a writer-researcher for the Royal Commission on the Status of Women and the LeDain Inquiry into Non-Medical Drug Use, before settling into many years of communications consulting for the government in Toronto and Ottawa.
Since the late 1990s, Myers has published widely in journals and anthologies, and has won literary prizes including Other Voices (first place, 2000) as well as Arc's Poem of the Year (HM, in 2006). For six years, she worked as an associate editor at Arc, Canada's National Poetry Magazine, to which she continues to contribute reviews and essays. She has published a number of chapbooks, both her own and collections compiled from the work of students in a poetry group she facilitates. A community activist, she lives in Ottawa, where she regularly volunteers for the Ottawa International Writers' Festival.
