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Lost Lagoon
lost in thought, prose poems
by Betsy Warland (Caitlin Press, 2020)
$20 | 86pp
“ … watching, listening, sniffing, occasionally speaking softly” — Betsy Warland’s Luminous Observations Where the City Meets the Park
Betsy Warland is a well-known and successful figure in the small pond of Canadian poetry, having published a baker’s dozen of volumes that include verse, creative non-fiction, essays and prose poems.
She received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2016 and helped found Canada’s Creative Nonfiction Collective and The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.
It is clear that Warland is a liminal creature, thriving at the boundaries where prose meets poetry, teachers meet students, the city meets nature, and one writer’s attentive, lucid mind encounters the quotidian glories and fierce adventures of life lived on the edge.
Lost Lagoon, the oddly named pond at the edge of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, serves in this lapidary work as Warland’s version of Thoreau’s Walden or Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek. For all these writers, a close reading of the life and death events at a small location opens out into transcendent beauty, subtle thought and sublime feeling.
