The Blue Gate (Downloadable PDF)
by Kathryn MacDonald
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?
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Additional information
| Page Count | 84 |
|---|---|
| Year Published | 2026 |
Kathryn MacDonald
Kathryn MacDonald’s poetry has been published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S., and other countries. She is the author of Wayside: A Small Boat, A Vacant Lot, A Man (poetry chapbook, 2026), Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (poetry chapbook, 2024), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (2010), and Calla & Édourd (novel, 2009).
Poems rich with fleeting life: an unlit candle, rain on heart-shaped leaves, a Red-Tailed Hawk sky dancing. Wild love in the first bite of an apple. Grief, a leaf perpetually falling. Poems that point us beyond the unseen. Poems that sing us home.
~ Susan Musgrave, author of Hunger
“In The Blue Gate, leaves curl, seasons change, apples trees blossom, and “red-tail hawks carve circles in a clear sky”, but this poetry collection by Kathryn MacDonald is more than just an examination of nature. It is an examination of the poet’s imagination, what happens when one steps through The Blue Gate, and memory and restlessness intertwine to make sense of what? A trip to Africa? Moonlight? Human desire and longing? These things certainly, but also those other paths that lie just beyond our seeing.”
~ Chris Banks, author of Bonfires
From a shared life on the land in rural Ontario to an unexpected sojourn in Kenya and Tanzania in an attempt to outrun grief, Kathryn MacDonald’s The Blue Gate anchors itself in the tenderness of long love and the deep sadness that attends its passing. In finely wrought lines stitched to the land she loves, MacDonald confronts the reality that only way of navigating the blue gate of loss is to step through it at last.
~ Jenna Butler, author of Recovery: A Year of Bees