Boom Time, Tar Swan and Prologue for the Age of Consequence
Garth Martens’s debut performance, in his 2014 book Prologue for the Age of Consequence, set a poetic template, hammered together with a framer’s hammer and a carpenter’s level, for [...]
Sid Marty
Sid Marty
Vistas of the West: Poems and Visuals of Nature
Vistas of the West is a well-designed, attractive hardback that may grace the coffee table of many a western home for years to come. It would make a good gift to mail to any puzzled easterner who [...]
Blackfoot Country
Publishers and authors have the right to define their books by genre as they please—a book of poetry in this case. But to my eye and ear, the text of Walter Hildebrandt’s Blackfoot Country is [...]
Part 1: A Tribute to Charlie Russell
Charlie Russell loved to fly, and he seldom phoned first those times when he would fly his Kolb ultralight airplane north from Hawk’s Nest ranch on the boundary of Waterton Lakes National Park, [...]
Firewater:
One of the many Canadian communities hit hard by the ongoing fentanyl debacle is Standoff, Alberta, headquarters of the Kainai (Blood) First Nation, where a state of emergency was declared in [...]
How I Did Not Try to Kill Andrew Suknaski
Andy, late lamented friend, celebrated author of Wood Mountain Poems, The Ghosts Call You Poor and many other texts: you were too frail and too medicated, the last time I saw you alive, to chew [...]
The Banker and the Blackfoot: A Memoir of My Grandfather in Chinook Country
John “Jack” Cowdry, the author’s grandfather, first came to my attention in L.V. Kelly’s Alberta ranching chronicle The Range Men (1913). The Cowdry brothers were the first bankers to set up shop [...]
In Praise of Protest
On January 24, 2012, the Stop Castle Logging protest had been underway for 13 days in temperatures down to −35 degrees and a wind-chill reaching −45. Alberta Forest Service (AFS) had served [...]
Spin, Baby, Spin
Power outages are not rare here at the foot of the Livingstone Range north of the Crowsnest Pass, thanks to summer electrical storms, ice buildup in winter and west winds that can gust (where I [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains
It looks like spectacular wild country, but some see it more as a big money sandwich.
The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and ...
Herd Memory
On a cold day in February, I flew over the tightly knit stands of black spruce and jack pine in northwestern Alberta, straining my eyes below, eager to catch sight of a woodland caribou. My dad, a wildlife biologist, called them the “grey ghosts” of the boreal. Woodland caribou have ...
Uncanny Resemblance
Historians are loathe to use the past to describe the present. But sometimes similarities between past and present are sufficiently striking that they may well offer up some useful lessons for today. The parallels between Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government and William “Bible Bill” Aberhart’s Social Credit government of the ...