“On the Busy Old Ranch”
Written by Katelyn Toney, Illustrated
by Rebecca Allen
Published by Bluestem Books
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$15.00
ISBN 978-1-7388027-0-8
Katelyn Toney lives the hectic farmer/rancher lifestyle near Tompkins in southwest Saskatchewan with her husband and four children, and when she noted a lack of children’s books that depict the family’s unique way of life, she wrote one. The illustrated board book, On the Busy Old Ranch, is a 1-10 counting book with full-bleed illustrations by Rebecca Allen, rhyming stanzas, and child-friendly but apt portrayals of diverse ranch families’ chore-filled daily life.
In a CTV Regina television interview, Toney said she’d been reading to her kids “every day for the past 15 years,” and noted that there were “not a lot of books showcasing the life we live out here raising cattle on the prairies”. She said that there are many farm and rodeo-themed kids’ books, but what she found “really didn’t depict the lifestyle” she and her family experience.
The first page spread sets the book’s tone and two-stanza, rhyming style:
On the busy old ranch
by the barn in the sun
worked a big mama cowgirl
and her little cowgirl one.
“Feed,” said the mama.
“I feed,” said the one.
So they both fed the horses
by the barn in the sun.
Allen’s colourful, light-hearted illustrations
reveal a large-eyed mother and daughter, both with red braids, forking hay and
feeding the smiling horse, while another horse munches grass against a backdrop
of prairie sky and a tall red barn. The subsequent pages all begin with “On the
busy old ranch,” and include “an old papa cowboy,” “the ranchhand lady,” “the
silly auntie cowgirl” and “some kindly neighbours/and some little cowkids ten”.
I was pleased to see the illustrator’s inclusion of solar power for heating
water and the multi-ethnic cast of characters. Details like an old boot slung
on a fencepost, a grasshopper, and tumbleweeds caught in barbed wire are
familiar sights to this prairie-born and raised reviewer.
Toney’s lively text reveals the many daily responsibilities on the ranch—like fixing water bowls, loading cattle into a trailer “through the liner’s rolling door,” and pounding nails into barbed wire fencing—but there are also pages dedicated to rest (all characters and the family dog are shown sleeping on the grass beneath a gold-leafed tree); fun (swinging on the “old rusty gate”), and prayer “And they all prayed for rain/under clouds that reached to heaven”. In the cute illustration for the latter, even the gopher has its hands clasped in prayer.
During the CTV interview, Toney said the book is “a love story” to the people involved in farmer/ranching, and to the lifestyle itself. Her website adds that the story is “perfect for rural kids who want to read a story familiar with their way of life, as well as kids who would like to learn about life on a ranch”.
The small and sturdy hardcover is ideal for little hands—and beginning counters—and includes a plug for bedtime reading. To learn more about Toney and her first book—I’m certain there are more tales to come—see www.KatelynToney.ca.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“The Foxholes at the Borders of Sofa Cushions”
By Counce Brampton
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth
Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 978-1-988783-99-4
They say it’s about the journey, not the reward. In the literary world, the reward might be considered the publication of a book. For Saskatoon poet Counce Brampton, a “quiet observer of life” who’s lived most of his adulthood in a group home (as a result of OCD and other mental health issues), my sense is that it’s always been about the journey, yet his first poetry collection, The Foxholes at the Borders of Sofa Cushions, has been published, and it opens with a generous introduction by his friend and mentor, internationally-revered writer Yann Martel.
Martel began meeting with Brampton when the former was serving as writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library twenty years ago. The Life of Pi author quickly gleaned that Brampton wasn’t seeking “editorial guidance but affirmation and validation”. Martel continues to provide that today, and explains that “This book is the result of a wish to safeguard what is essentially Counce Brampton’s life work, the mark he will leave”.
Interestingly, the poems appear next to images of their first incarnations, handprinted in Brampton’s coiled notebook. Where words or lines were struck from the first draft, they appear with strikelines on the typed pages, as well. Martel’s editing is deliberately slight: “What we have here are the spontaneous workings of [Brampton’s] mind, the words and phrases that strike him, the ideas that spring fully formed and those that evolve from one draft to the next”.
I’m immediately drawn to the first poem’s strong images and sensory details. “In the Back of a Seaport Tavern,” includes “A seal’s corpse on a woodplank/gouged and steaming like fresh asphalt” and “An old bedspring against the yardfence/rusted and corrupted by old sea salt”. The idea of a bedspring being “corrupted” is inspired.
The poems feel like dreamspeak, like journal entries. Line are repeated throughout, but “The repetition is part of the spell,” Martel writes. “The point here is not destination but movement, a ramble through language.”
We see the poet experimenting on the page: some lines—and even words—are left incomplete. The piece “In a room filled with dim ghostlight” (great title) begins thus:
In a room filled with ghostlight
In a room filled with
dim ghostlight
In a dim filled
The second line reappears—like a ghost—across the next two pages, or contains slight variation: “In a room filled with nothing and dim ghostlight”.
On one page, "when” is the sole word. Another of the briefest offerings is an untitled list of five words: doorway/streetlight/fender/seashell/drum. Other poems do indeed “ramble through language,” and what gorgeous language it sometimes is: “The sun shone down/with a light, italian orange sustenance/on all the townspeople”. And “the full moon made of fresh pale stone”. I admire “all our hands held the dust of dreams and crumbled icons” (from “Of failure”).
The book’s beautifully produced. The cover is a photo of a worn leather couch in tall grass beside a river. Logical? Perhaps not, but like Brampton’s work, it’s compelling all the same.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“The History Forest”
By Michael Trussler
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 9-780889-778948
Books by multi-genre writer and University of Regina professor of English Michael Trussler make a mark. Take The Sunday Book, a nonfiction title that garnered two awards in the 2023 Saskatchewan Book Awards. Take The History Forest, the poetry collection for which Trussler earned the Poetry Award in the same provincial competition. An admirable trifecta.
I read the latter slowly, and twice: it’s dense, philosophical, apocalyptic, and often surreal, and I didn’t always know how to navigate it—something like walking through a forest under the cape of night. To read Trussler is to have one’s mind stretched; I even remembered things I’d forgotten, ie: The Twinkie Defence. This dexterous poet quotes myriad poets and writers; references artworks and philosophers; and had me regularly Googling (ie: Panpyschism; Ordovician; ekistics; hand-wrestler Candy Pain; Zen monk, Kenkō). Even the line and stanza breaks kept me guessing in this experimental book.
In Trussler’s poetic universe, a strong sense of humanity’s vulnerability pervades—and the sturdy conviction that we’ve doomed ourselves. There’s a “gasoline haze/above the playground” and “peripatetic plastic straws/washed up on the sand,” will “last far longer than your great-/grandchildren”. Civilization is “blistered and botched”. God is here, and equally fearful: “And it may/well be that the only thing I’ll regret, says God to himself, is/having never run away from home. But where/to hide amidst all this life that’s heaving?” I don’t know, and Trussler doesn’t pretend to either.
Time appears to be one of the characters in this globally-aware collection. “In Japan they’ve made a skating rink/of crushed centuries and untold/species of fish,” he writes. In a later poem: “Arctic ice very soon making room for better cables for instant digital connection between Tokyo and London”. And in the piece “Salvador Dali and the Glacier,” Trussler asserts that “Ice is losing its various/names and it’s not only avian malaria that’s on the rise”.
Striking juxtapositions and stream-of-consciousness are at constant, startling play. In a single poem one finds pencil crayons and a Zip-loc bag; heroin and “sky-blue vodka bottles;” a “rain-rusted/wheelbarrow asleep on the heath” and “the Youtube cry of peacocks, flamingoes,/humpback whales, and antelopes as lithe as wind farms in/Germany”. Yes, “something wyrd is all around”.
The book’s final section is an essay titled “Bodhisattva on a Bicycle,” and it begins: “Appearing from nowhere, the world sometimes catches itself within various mirrors. It takes luck to open them, and then to listen to what’s gathered inside.” Mirrors play an ongoing role in this pensive collection. Trussler examines himself, history, the natural world, the environment, and contemporary society in the looking glass, and explores “what it means to be alive in this increasingly contradictory and frightening era in human history”.
This original, award-winning poet observes, he questions, he reveres birds. Owls (one’s featured on the cover), mourning doves, oystercatchers, swallows, red-breasted nuthatches, a “grey cockatiel,” grebes, bluebirds … “Birds aren’t here to give me any kind of grace,/but they do give grace, they make me feel part of the world again.”
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
