Books


Duet for Wings and Earth

Sono Nis Press, 2008 ISBN 978-1-55039-164-0
World Guild Award

 

Winner (tie), The Word Guild 2009 Awards,
“Book, Special” category

 

Barbara Colebrook Peace’s re-imagining of the Christ story takes the reader on a journey that is at once familiar and marvellously mythical. These beautifully wrought poems written from multiple points of view —God’s, Christ’s, Mary’s, Joseph’s, an innkeeper’s, Bethlehem’s, the moon’s, the Magi’s, even a donkey’s — illuminate the landscape of first century Jerusalem. By turns playful, meditative, and mystical, these imaginative renderings, imbued with the poet’s deeply personal spirituality, grapple with the immensity of space and time and our small place in them.

The language and phrasing throughout Duet for Wings and Earth resonates with a musicality that reminds us that these poems of praise were originally written for performance. Although Colebrook Peace takes the gospels as her starting point, her poems address people of all religions, as well as atheists and agnostics. Choosing light over darkness, her vision enlarges our humanity, bringing us closer to that which some of us call God. Quite simply, Duet for Wings and Earth speaks to our universal longing for the divine.

“Barbara Colebrook Peace’s Duet for Wings and Earth restores us to the Bethlehem of the heart...The poet re-enters the story of the nativity to re-fire it absolutely fresh, timely, and cosmological.”
—Susan McCaslin


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Kyrie

Sono Nis Press, 2001 ISBN 1-55039-117-8

Kyrie: a prayer calling for compassion, remembrance and homecoming.

“The far side of the moon, just “north of sorrow”, is Peace territory. This poet’s original, unsentimental voice provides a compassionate map of her country. One we shan’t forget. As Wilfred Owen said in another context, “The Poetry is in the pity.”
—P.K. Page

These poems offer a truly compassionate vision. One senses that Barbara Colebrook Peace has been taking notes and paying attention for a long while. A fine thing too for her work comes to us now shimmering with intelligence. Myth, memory, sorrow and longing. This is poetry that shows us a way into the light.
—Patricia Young

 

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P.K. Page:
Essays on Her Works

Guernica Editions, 2001 ISBN 1-55071-134-2

In 2001, the International Year of the Poet, P.K. Page’s “Planet Earth,” based on lines by Pablo Neruda, was sent into space by the United Nations. Poets, critics, and friends in her orbit have contributed to this collection about her working life. Essays and interviews by Brian Bartlett, Patricia Young, Lucy Bashford, Carol Matthews, Jay Ruzesky, Susan Musgrave, Travis Lane, Kelly Parsons, Barbara Colebrook Peace, Harold Rhenisch, and Linda Rogers reveal facets of this enigmatic writer whose glittering surfaces reconcile the mysteries within and without.