Grace Must Wander

By: Stephanie McKenzie

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In Stephanie McKenzie's second collection, grace wanders through snowdrifts and late nights and finds its way to Northern Ireland, Newfoundland and the United States. In these poems, grace feels a particular affinity with Van Gogh, with Sylvia Plath, with women who can no longer speak for themselves. We learn that grace must wander even with the lonely sight of crows. ...

ISBN	978-1-907056-12-3
Pub Date	Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Cover Image	'White marguerites' Â© Dmitriy Gool \| Dreamstime.com
Page Count	74
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In Stephanie McKenzie's second collection, grace wanders through snowdrifts and late nights and finds its way to Northern Ireland, Newfoundland and the United States. In these poems, grace feels a particular affinity with Van Gogh, with Sylvia Plath, with women who can no longer speak for themselves. We learn that grace must wander even with the lonely sight of crows.

Stephanie McKenzie

Stephanie McKenzie has published two other collections of poetry with Salmon, Cutting My Mother’s Hair (2006) and Grace Must Wander (2009), and a monograph, Before the Country: Native Renaissance: Canadian Mythology, with the University of Toronto Press (2007). She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto. McKenzie was born and raised in British Columbia but lives on the opposite Canadian coast now in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. She teaches in the English Programme at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University, where she is an Associate Professor.

The Disciples of Winter

for Elizabeth Behrens

Grace must wander even with the lonely sight of crows,
the purple and the purple black, each one spotted
like a snowflake, fingerprint. Birds sing of other worlds
that are not grown here but happen somewhere out there
in the land of blow away the dead and make a wish
we give to children. They have learned to stretch their necks
out, offer up their throats on blue platters of the sky, do not seek
pity, feel shame. Their feathers fallen give us leave to ponder.
Consider the city. It mimics the crow, black throat
caught at the chords sings out a promise of day.
Evening, and morning, and at noon, transparent
and bound to truth, the knowing of winter is clean,
like a scar storied and sure of where it's been.