Seeing Lessons

By: Catherine Owen

September 2010
96 pages | ISBN 978-1-894987-48-6
$17.00

Mattie Gunterman (1872-1945) is a fascinating character, capable of walking from Seattle to Beaton, BC, running a full camp-kitchen, caring for her children and taking fascinating portraits of a British Columbia that has all but vanished, both the people and the trees. In thoughtful and elegantly written poems, Catherine Owen traces the path of this remarkable woman, contrasting both modern life and the modern environment with what Mattie would have encountered. Part biography, part environmental elegy, Seeing Lessons leaves readers seeing the world in a different light.

Reviews

• Review (Andrea Taylor, goodreads.com, 08/31/2011)
• Re-voicing the Dead (M. Travis Lane, The Fiddlehead, 10/25/2011)
  “My favourite poem in Seeing Lessons is the first, ‘Dislodging Socrates,’...How I wish I had written that!”
• Review (Laura Cameron, Claudine Gélinas-Faucher and Renaud Rousse, The Bull Calf, 01/01/2011)
  "She has a beautiful way of putting language together and she has a sense of how to narrate a story."

Downloads

Seeing Lessons
Read an excerpt of Seeing Lessons by Catherine Owen