A Single Syllable of Wild (Downloadable PDF)
The Blue Gate explores the surprise of love, the shock of loss, and challenges boundaries and liminal spaces. It probes into a love affair that defies conventions, capturing the narrator’s voice from the first lyrical poem. With the death of the belovèd, an invitation to fly to Kenya arrives; it’s accepted; and the long title poem ravels and unravels reality. Poems in the final section question the loss of intimacy, loneliness, change, and unattainable acceptance. The poetry is vivid and grounded in the senses and in nature, whether set in Canada or Africa. The collection seeks – what – understanding, consolation, release, or does it ask whether love enriches or leaves one lost?
If you want to order the physical book and receive this PDF for free, click HERE.
$9.95 CAD
Additional information
| Page Count | 72 |
|---|---|
| Year Published | 2026 |
Angela Waldie
Angela Waldie is a writer, editor, and university instructor, living in Treaty 7 Territory, in Calgary, Alberta. As she grew up in Creston, BC, her poetry often crosses and recrosses the Continental Divide. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Grain, Event, The Goose, FreeFall, The Antigonish Review, and various anthologies.
If it’s possible to hold a finger to the pulse of a living place, that is what Angela Waldie has done in this book. At their best, these poems seem to have emerged from the wild itself, rather than from the pen of a deeply observant, quietly passionate poet. Sometimes, when confronting wonder, words fail; these don’t. They sing.
~ Kevin Van Tigham, author of Understory: An Ecologist’s Memoir of Loss and Hope
Fiercely committed to the non-human species who occupy the land we share and destroy, Angela Waldie’s urgent, lyrically acute collection is both elegy and wake-up call. These beautiful clear-eyed poems sing, indict, and grieve.
~ Margo Wheaton, author of Rags of Night in Our Mouths
Angela Waldie’s poems in A Single Syllable of Wild vibrate with exquisitely precise observations of the birds, animals, and landscapes of the Canadian Rockies. At the same time, overtones of the fragility of the natural world in the face of the human onslaught resonate throughout her finely crafted words, making her perceptive writing both celebration and elegy. She finds hope, though, in the beauty discovered in a burned-over forest, as newly reappearing trees and flowers “root exuberance / in charred soil.”
~ Tom Wayman, author of How Can You Live Here? and The Road to Appledore
A Single Syllable of Wild offers a close-up view of the natural world necessarily complicated by the ways in which we humans keep on moving through its valleys. Here, the bears are not only tagged and dying on the highway, but also ferociously free and moving; the lichens and Woodland Caribou remain, resilient and true; and each dammed stream eventually reclaims its flood basin. So even though we enter these poems with a “pack heavy with rivers,” each current spills out as we move through every page’s waters. The further we go, contour line by contour line, the more these poems offer us exactly the sort of map each of us could use right now: “old growth deep enough to dream in.”
~ Rob Winger, author of It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant