Awards

• Short-listed for Kobzar Book Award 2020 (Canada)

Overview

You lie awake, needlessly fingering this patchwork guilt. Remorse, a code you live by; distress calls for someone to blame. —from “Threads” Following the deaths of her Mennonite grandparents, Angeline Schellenberg began exploring their influence on her life. Her elegiac love letter to them articulates her grief against the backdrop of their involuntary emigration. She artfully captures the immigrant identity, vital to Canadian culture, in poems that draw on events both personal and global: war and famine, dementia and cancer, hidden sacrifice and secrets. Her poems captivate with themes of ancestry, memory, resilience, and forgiveness. Fields of Light and Stone is a reflection on how family history shapes and moves us.

Full Product Details

Author:   Angeline Schellenberg
Publisher:   University of Alberta Press
Imprint:   University of Alberta Press
Dimensions:   Width: 13.30cm , Height: 0.60cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.128kg
ISBN:  

9781772125115

ISBN 10:   1772125113
Pages:   104
Publication Date:   16 March 2020
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

Everything There Is to Say • ix In some reminiscent hour Love Letters, 1944–45 • 4–47 Time in Evergreen Resurrection • 7 Tokens of Mercy • 9 This Is His Body • 11 Threads • 14 Beckoning Hills • 16 Preaching to the Choir • 17 Dementia, Warm October • 18 Grandpa’s Day Timers • 21 For When You Wondered Why I Wasn’t There • 23 The Minute I Heard You Died • 25 After Eights • 26 Funeral Tape • 28 Clouds above Canola Gardening Advice from the Wife of a Pious Pastor • 33 The Autumn of Your Cancer • 35 Scavenger Hunt • 37 Between Seed and Harvest • 38 For Your Name’s Sake • 39 Closure • 42 The Night of the Fair • 44 Are you sewing, Mom? • 46 Deep Breathing • 48 What Little Things Come to Us • 49 There Is the Old Brick House • 50 Fields of Light and Stone Fields • 54 Shivered into Being In My First Five Year Diary • 57 Making Sheep • 58 Unwinding • 59 Oma’s Girl • 60 Bias Binding • 61 In Whispers He’s Still the Wanderer • 63 All Is Bright • 64 As We Left They Sang • 65 Edges • 67 Division • 69 What the Aspens Whispered Under the Shadow of Your Name • 73 He Made Me Promise to Remember Arkadak • 74 Ancient Script • 76 Generations • 77 Plans to Prosper • 78 His Hands • 79 Sunset on Deep Bay • 80 Souvenir • 81 After the Funeral, I Pick up My Box • 82 Passages • 83 The First Trees • 84 Notes • 85 Acknowledgements • 89

Reviews

Schellenberg's collection is a love letter to these four people [grandparents] whose lives were so completely intertwined with hers. Kyla Neufeld, Prairie Books Now, Spring/Summer 2020 [Full article at https://prairiebooksnow.ca/articles/view/poet-reflects-on-her-grandparents-lives-through-poetry-and-collected-letters-artifacts] Schellenberg's best poems don't offer easy answers, and do a good job of letting the question lie. -- Jonathan Ball While most of the book's poems are based on personal connections Schellenberg built with her grandparents over the years, she also explores topics of their ancestry, immigration, and courtship.... Some of the poems touch on the poignant theme of loss... [Full review at https://nivervillecitizen.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/former-nivervillians-second-book-reflects-on-grandparents] -- Brenda Sawatzky Fields of Light and Stone excavates the relationships between Schellenberg's Mennonite grandparents....The book moves among various styles and source materials as through sheaves of distinct documents... [Full article at https://canlit.ca/article/sinews-and-sheaves/] -- Carl Watts * Canadian Literature * I was immediately attracted to its contents because of the illustration on the jacket (Last Embrace by Miriam Rudolph).... Between the covers are poems that sing of love and loss.... Schellenberg's playful use of words is evident throughout.... This book will resonate with those writing memoirs or translating old letters and will perhaps inspire others to do so. Not that long ago, I sat with the boxes of correspondence my parents had left behind after they passed away. Many of the thoughts Schellenberg expresses in her creative, poetic style went through my mind at that time and they linger still. She has left a tribute to her grandparents that will stand the test of time. -- Elfrieda Neufeld Schroeder, Mennonite History, December 2020

Schellenberg's collection is a love letter to these four people [grandparents] whose lives were so completely intertwined with hers. Kyla Neufeld, Prairie Books Now, Spring/Summer 2020 [Full article at https://prairiebooksnow.ca/articles/view/poet-reflects-on-her-grandparents-lives-through-poetry-and-collected-letters-artifacts] Schellenberg's best poems don't offer easy answers, and do a good job of letting the question lie. -- Jonathan Ball While most of the book's poems are based on personal connections Schellenberg built with her grandparents over the years, she also explores topics of their ancestry, immigration, and courtship.... Some of the poems touch on the poignant theme of loss... [Full review at https://nivervillecitizen.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/former-nivervillians-second-book-reflects-on-grandparents] -- Brenda Sawatzky

Schellenberg's collection is a love letter to these four people [grandparents] whose lives were so completely intertwined with hers. Kyla Neufeld, Prairie Books Now, Spring/Summer 2020 [Full article at https://prairiebooksnow.ca/articles/view/poet-reflects-on-her-grandparents-lives-through-poetry-and-collected-letters-artifacts] Schellenberg's best poems don't offer easy answers, and do a good job of letting the question lie. -- Jonathan Ball While most of the book's poems are based on personal connections Schellenberg built with her grandparents over the years, she also explores topics of their ancestry, immigration, and courtship.... Some of the poems touch on the poignant theme of loss... [Full review at https://nivervillecitizen.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/former-nivervillians-second-book-reflects-on-grandparents] -- Brenda Sawatzky Fields of Light and Stone excavates the relationships between Schellenberg's Mennonite grandparents....The book moves among various styles and source materials as through sheaves of distinct documents... [Full article at https://canlit.ca/article/sinews-and-sheaves/] -- Carl Watts * Canadian Literature * I was immediately attracted to its contents because of the illustration on the jacket (Last Embrace by Miriam Rudolph).... Between the covers are poems that sing of love and loss.... Schellenberg's playful use of words is evident throughout.... This book will resonate with those writing memoirs or translating old letters and will perhaps inspire others to do so. Not that long ago, I sat with the boxes of correspondence my parents had left behind after they passed away. Many of the thoughts Schellenberg expresses in her creative, poetic style went through my mind at that time and they linger still. She has left a tribute to her grandparents that will stand the test of time. -- Elfrieda Neufeld Schroeder, Mennonite History, December 2020 # 1 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, February 14, 2021 Schellenberg's Fields of Light and Stone enacts the terms of her title with its tender and exacting invocations of familial love.... [O]ne of the delicate strengths of Schellenberg's poems of mourning is their fresh grief at old losses.... Fields of Light and Stone has a light touch that never confuses love for denial of death, and Angeline Schellenberg finds painful beauty in the imperfections of mourning. -- Tanis MacDonald, Journal of Mennonite Studies, 2021

Author Information

Angeline Schellenberg is a poet living in Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). Her first full-length collection, Tell Them It Was Mozart, received three Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for a ReLit Award for Poetry.

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