Borrowed Rooms
By Barbara Pelman

These poems, spare and nuanced, explore the borrowed rooms we inhabit in personal relationships: the temporary homes of marriage and parenting; the personas we carry for a little while and must ultimately abandon. In tight and unsentimental poems, Barbara Pelman grieves the death of a father, notes the changing dynamics of mothers and daughters, watches the doors irrevocably close on a marriage, and delights in the temporal beauty surrounding her: the simple splendour of garry oak and hawthorn, arbutus branches bent to the shape of wind, and the stutter of shoreline. The idea of a borrowed room finds expression in Pelman’s deft use of form: she writes sonnets, sestinas, ghazals and glosas borrowed from ancient Persia and Renaissance Italy that surprise us with their intensity and tactile clarity. The image of a borrowed room has other implications: from the window of the unfamiliar, her perspective on the familiar changes — her poems glimpse a Zen garden of star magnolia and early daffodil, islands drifting in a new sea, the rain shining the bones of trees on the beach — a sense, finally, of home. As she tells us in the final poem, "you do not know where you are until you are there, and even then, only time seems to have moved.".

"Barbara Pelman uncovers beauty in all that is broken, lost, and forlorn. Here are poems of straightforward clarity and sure control that capture the music of what it means to have loved and lost loved ones, to let go and yet find peace and beauty in the daily living of life." —Pamela Porter, GG winner for her verse novel, The Crazy Man

For many years Barbara Pelman has taught English at high school and college, primarily in B.C. Born in Vancouver, she has degrees from the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. She has been an active participant in the Victoria writing community: as a member of the Random Acts of Poetry team, a regular reader at Planet Earth Poetry, and the instigator of Victoria’s “Poetry Walls,” created by her students, in the downtown core. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Event, Fiddlehead, Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review and CV2. This is her second book of poetry, following One Stone published in 2005 by Ekstasis Editions.