A Beautiful Stone

In this collaboration between Monahan and Thompson, stanzas were exchanged as they built the poems together. The lakes and forests of northern Saskatchewan play a significant role, while the haunting echo and reply of the poets creates immediate and striking imagery for the reader. Solitude often results in a reflection on the past and these poems offer honest and surprising revelations about personal history. These are songs of sorrow, joy, celebration and reverence, like the rhythm of waves lapping against the shore.

Lynda Monahan

Author of three collections of poetry, A Slow Dance in the Flames, What My Body Knows, (Coteau Books) and Verge (Guernica Editions). She facilitates creative writing workshops and has been writer-in-residence at St. Peter’s College facilitated retreat and the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. She is editor of Second Chances: stories of brain injury survivors, Skating in the Exit Light, a poetry anthology, and With Just One Reach of Hands, an anthology of the writing of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Writing For Your Life group, which she also facilitates. She recently finished a term as writer in residence at the JM Culenaere Library in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

Rod Thompson

Rod Thompson lives in the forest west of the city of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He has had his poetry published in a number of literary magazines including Grain, Transition, Blue Jay and  The Prairie Journal. He has long enjoyed writing tanka and haiku and his tanka have been published in American Tanka, Lynx, Tangled Hair, and most recently in in Atlas Poetica, an American tanka journal.