Available September 2005 ISBN 1-55380-029-X BISAC: POE000000, POE005000 6 x 9 114 pp trade paper $15.95 CDN $12.95 US POETRY, WOMEN’S STUDIES

Mandorla
By Nancy Holmes

Motherhood—personal, historical, mythological. Mandorla is all about mothers and children, especially the mothering of challenging children, children with disabilities. In the first section of Holmes’ new collection of poems, the Virgin Mary is the archetypal suffering mother who worries about the fate of her son. Through a poetic re-drawing of the hieratic poses of icons of the Virgin in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Holmes comes to recognize the fear and absolute love for a child who is fated to be different. The second section moves out of cultural myth into family history, the Ukrainian side of the poet’s family, people who settled in north-eastern Alberta in the first years of the twentieth century. These poems use images drawn from domestic fairy tales and the family farm, tracking imagined inner lives of immigrant children. Through speculation, magic and distorted family stories, Holmes explores not only the damage of mental disability, cultural displacement and corrosive prejudice, but also the beauty and social isolation of rural Alberta. In the last section of the book, the author focuses on her own experience of motherhood, its pain and comedy, its bewilderment and bedazzlement, its crushing collisions with schools and social systems. Holmes creates a triptych that opens up some of the emotional and spiritual adventure of being a parent, that most heart-breaking yet enriching of human roles, past or present.

“Mandorla is a generous, high-spirited trilogy that overturns the narrative of silencing that its subject so often inspires. Holmes' portraits of women and mothers, both real and iconic, are flamboyant gestures of affection and difficulty.”
—Sharon Thesen

Nancy Holmes has published three previous collections of poetry, The Adultery Poems (Ronsdale, 2002), Down to the Golden Chersonese: Victorian Lady Travellers (Sono Nis, 1991) and Valancy and the New World (Kalamalka, 1988). She was born in Edmonton, Alberta, went to high school in Toronto and university in Calgary where she received her MA in English. She has lived in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia for the past fourteen years and teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She is the mother of three nearly grown-up sons and lives with her family in Summerland, B.C.