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parsed(2018-03-03) - pubdate: 2018-03-03
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pub date: 1520056800
today: 1711602000, pubdate > today = false

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Summer of the Horse

March 3, 2018 | Trade paperback
ISBN: 9781550178197
$19.95
Reader Reward Price: $17.96 info
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Description

What do you do when you decide you no longer want to be responsible for anyone but yourself? When faced with that moment, Donna Kane leaves her twenty-five-year marriage for life with a conservationist and wilderness guide who is so certain of the path he is on that she thinks she's just along for the ride. A few days before Kane's new husband leaves for a three-month horse-pack expedition, a gelding is seriously injured, and she agrees to stay behind to tend the horse's wound. In the quiet moments spent with the horse each day, she reflects on her transition into the new relationship, the wilderness of the unknown, and her struggles with personal autonomy and independence. A deft writer, Kane takes readers on her inaugural trail ride into the stunning Muskwa-Kechika protected area, known as the "Serengeti of the North." She rides with a pack string of horses over mountain passes, into boreal forests, along swamps and sand flats, crossing creeks and fast-flowing rivers. A novice horsewoman traversing new terrain, she is startled out of her familiar routines and must examine her assumptions of the wild, within and without, to find her place in the world. With honesty and humility, Kane reveals the folly, surprise and knowledge--of the world and of the self--that can come from setting foot in the headstrong currents of the unknown. Including striking photos of the Muskwa-Kechika and the pack string horses, the book touches on universal issues of ecological protection and individual identity. Summer of the Horse is sure to captivate readers interested in equine pursuits as well as those concerned with the ecological issues facing BC's far north.

About this Author

ISBN: 9781550178197
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 224
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2018-03-03

Reviews

"Who can know the mind of another being? Who can even know their own?" These questions form the armature of a deeply reflective book about love and wilderness. It's a book about changing your life and about letting life change you, a lyric meditation with its feet on the ground. Kane's vision is unsentimental, startling in its honesty, and also, at every moment, intensely alive to beauty. She is that rare thing, both a philosopher and a poet.

I cherish this book. It's a love story, not only between a remarkable man and an equally remarkable woman, but between this same woman and horses, this same woman and the BC wilderness. There is such fine thinking between these pages that could only have been written by a poet/philosopher, by someone who opens her mind and body to the beauties and sorrows that surround her and who finds the words to knot everything together with such finesse they'll never come apart. Summer of the Horse is a perfect gift to give someone you care for, someone who you want to help heal.

How to describe this remarkable book? Memoir, nature encounter tale, equestrian pilgrim's progress, wilderness meditation, hands-on philosophy--its separate acts of attention speak to and deepen each other. Maybe we should simply call it a love story, giving that its widest possible resonance and cutting most of the violin section. Whatever its description, Summer of the Horse is a book to cherish.

"For those who already appreciate Kane's verse, this book will be a delight... often the pleasure she finds in language enlivens her subject, as with a group of rocks at the top of Bevin Pass: "[S]hale shards jutting up like . . . shark fins, the tips pocked with crinoline blooms of lichen that ever so slowly grind the rock down.For those familiar with Canadian wilderness writing and ecological art, the book's setting in the Muskwa-Kechika is itself something to conjure with... Kane tours us around backstage through the praxis and the philosophy of separate and overlapping artistic and environmental missions--hers and [Wayne] Sawchuk's--and it's invaluable."

~Richard Pickard, Canadian Literature, November 16, 2018

"Her descriptions of the natural world show a poet's sensitivity to image and language. On one page, we might be focused on the subtle striations of an insect's wing, on the next, we're surveying a hundred miles of wilderness from the top of a mountain peak. These shifts in range and register make for a sometimes rocky and circuitous ride, much like the trails through the boreal forests that Kane has come to love--and much like life itself." - Susan Olding, Malahat Review, Spring 2019

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