Edge Seasons by Beth Powning
Knopf Canada 2005, available in paperback by Vintage Canada, September 2006

The Globe and Mail - "There are few writers who can evoke the wild world with such intensity and originality...This memoir is a book to return to, if only to find our way." Patrick Lane Click here to read the complete review

Winnipeg Free Press - "...a joyful, lyrical celebration of life and of the Earth we inhabit, always grounded in the here and now.
Dense as it is with meaning and description, it is an effortless read that makes us look anew at life, and the promise of each day that we are given. It is, quite simply, a wonderful book." Click here to read the complete review

Telegraph Journal, Saint John - "...a powerful memoir...masterful use of evocative language..."

The Daily Gleaner, Fredericton - "...a moving and compelling book.."

The Citizen, Ottawa - "...eloquent..."

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Beautifully written memoir good news.
Sunday, September 25th, 2005

Reviewed by Bernadette Phillips
FOR those already familiar with New Brunswick literary writer Beth Powning's work (Shadow Box, The Hatbox Letters), the release of Edge Seasons, an elegiac and beautifully written memoir, is good news indeed.The wonder, of course, is that she hasn't already been mentioned in the same breath as writers such as Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields.

The edge seasons (thresholds when the land seems to hang between what has happened and what is yet to come) provide the framework of the book.
It is divided into sections, from the beginning of one fall to the end of the next, each season blending seamlessly into the following, in a tapestry dense with meaning and reminiscence. While autobiographical, the narrative avoids the pitfall of self-indulgent hindsight. Against the ominous backdrop of the war in Vietnam and the draft in the 1960s, Powning and her artist husband, straight out of college and newly married, decide that the war is present in their lives "like an inevitable disease" and their future has "no shape."

As bucolic as their existence is in their small house in Connecticut, the thoughts of war, and farm boys used as cannon fodder in the jungles of Vietnam, push them into the decision to leave the United States and head north to Canada.The last day of their exploratory trip to New Brunswick leads the young couple literally to a fork in the road, and their fateful decision to take a dirt road to the left, inevitably invites comparison with New England poet Robert Frost's The Road not Taken. Like Frost, Powning invariably describes events in the context of their natural surroundings, without the contrived preciousness of self-conscious rearranging of the facts. Devoid of the anti-war rhetoric usually associated with that time, Powning's simple account of their decision ironically has a greater impact on the reader, set as it is against their idyllic life with maples "burning in the tawny sun." Her prose manages to be rich yet economical. Powning is a sure-footed writer, as practical as she is poetic. While "insects spin... making the most of days that seem like the long blink of heavy eyelids," time is also filled by the folding of laundry, packing pots for shipment and tending to sick animals.

She is superb at giving shape and voice to the petty details and fears of everyday life, acknowledging that she is often "tormented by self- doubt." This is no reclusive life. Bills must be paid and the world intrudes. The present is often swallowed up in work, and the future's "diminishing span" reminds the writer of all the things she may never accomplish. Life in the countryside, although slower paced, is no insulation from reality. Her husband Peter's pottery business, the building of the sauna (which becomes the leitmotif of their new life), her photography, gardening and writing, her joy and pain in motherhood are all viewed in the context of the natural world around them, and the busier world beyond. Everyday tasks and objects are lovingly and simply noted. Even as she mourns the loss of self, the periodic abstraction of a busy husband, and the temporary alienation of a teenage son, Powning is always attuned to the sights and sounds around her. From "dried geranium leaves on the blue window sills" to a killing frost that reduces "thatch-coloured corn leaves" to rattling precursors of winter's onset, all are faithfully recorded in an almost pantheistic manner. Edge Seasons engages the reader from the first page. It is a joyful, lyrical celebration of life and of the Earth we inhabit, always grounded in the here and now.
Dense as it is with meaning and description, it is an effortless read that makes us look anew at life, and the promise of each day that we are given. It is, quite simply, a wonderful book.

Bernadette Phillips is a Winnipeg artist and writer.
© 2005 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.

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The Globe and Mail
Patrick Lane
October 15, 2005

"The middle years of life are threshold years, and the opening of Edge Seasons places us at the door of Beth Powning's years of discontent. With a quiet, understated lyricism, she takes us through a year of doubt and indecision toward the possibility of renewed hope and wonder, and, for her, another life to live. She says, "There are seasons that have no names, at least not in my culture. They're edge seasons, thresholds, when the land seems to hang between what has just happened and what is yet to come.

In the life she is living at the beginning of the memoir, her only son is finishing high school and will soon be leaving home for university. She is aware that her husband is going through his own mid-life changes as a sculptor and potter who wishes to return to his creative roots. She is aware that he, too, is on the edge of change. The first half of her life is over, the second half has begun, and she does not feel that she is ready.

Beth Powning's spirit is between things: youth and age, old and new, the security of a remembered past and the promise of an unknown future. For her, this year of the memoir is a time to pay close attention to all that surrounds her. She has to replace herself. Their youthful coming to New Brunswick, their buying the farm, establishing a business and raising a son are alive in the present, but there is a world unfolding even as she tries to both deny and embrace it.

Early in the book, she watches a marsh hawk hunting. She says of the female hawk, "(In her) there's no sense of urgency. All things have run their course: risen, danced, and faded. The power that leapt from the spring soil expires in the amber light -- like a bear turning slowly in its cave; like a hawk falling from the sky." As I read this, I was reminded once again that everything a writer describes in a book is emblematic of our human condition. As the bear turns, as the hawk falls, so does Beth Powning.

The elegiac quality of time passed runs in a great metaphor through this book. Her ability to describe the things of her world -- a wasps's nest, a fiddlehead, a firefly, or a fish -- is remarkable. There are few writers who can evoke the wild world with such intensity and originality. Again and again, I was moved to silence by her words. She writes, "In a clearing, three destroying angels spread translucent gills over bunchberries, whose red, blade-shaped leaves bend towards their burden of one quivering raindrop." Her words are delivered in delicate understatement, each thing described caught perfectly. This is a writer who has spent long years observing the living creatures of her farm and valley. Out of them she has honed and harboured a craft of striking originality.

Robert Hass, the U.S. poet, writes, "All the new thinking is about loss./ In this it resembles all the old thinking." This memoir, like all memoirs, is about loss. Its presence is laid on the foundation of a life that is teetering on the threshold of maturity and age. For Powning, it is a moment of hesitation, of doubt, uneasiness and unpredictability. Her solution to this dilemma is to return to something in her life that was lost and forgotten and gives it new meaning.

The binding metaphor that holds her year together is that of the now derelict sauna she and her husband built when they first came to the farm. Over the years, they have let it fall away, the walls rotting, the foundation collapsing. Over this year, her family and friends rebuild it, making an attic above the sauna for her to retreat to, a place where she can begin her life as a writer. When it is finished, she and her man go to the sauna on an October night and ceremonially cleanse themselves.

This is a quiet, intense book. There are no huge catastrophes here, no great fictional epiphanies, no deaths or resurrections. Instead, what we get is the quiet of a simple, quite ordinary life made beautiful by her perceptions. I read it in increments over several weeks, and each sentence rewarded me with fresh insight into the simple world we might call holy, if we dared.

Powning says, "How many years, I wonder, did we live on this farm -- building, making, striving -- before we began to learn the stars?" The answer to that question lies at the heart of this memoir. Edge Seasons is a rare book and Beth Powning equally rare. This memoir is a book to return to, if only to find our way.

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