Book Launch and Reading With Music in Sharbot Lake

Jeff Green | Jan 18, 2023

The Rock Hill B&B in Sharbot Lake is hosting a book launch and reading for tw new books of poetry published by Woodpecker Lake Press.

One of the books is by Sharbot Lake poet Anne Archer. Her book is called “From the Frontenacs” and features poems inspired by her own corner of the world.

The other book, “Serve the Sorrowing World”, is by two Kingston poets, Meg Freer and Chantel Lavoie. It was written in honour of the Sisters of Providence, an order of nuns in Kingston who have been devoted to social justice since they were founded in 1861.

It is a free event, with light refreshments with music by Anne Archer. Both books will be available for $15, and partial proceeds from “From the Frontenacs” will be going to the North Frontenac Food Bank. Partial proceeds from the sale of “Serve the Sorrowing World” will go to the Sisters of Providence.

Frances Boyle of the League of Canadian Poets, has publishes a review of “Serve the Sorrowing World for poets.ca. The beginning of that review is below, followed by a link to the conclusion

(This lovely short book by Kingston authors Meg Freer and Chantel Lavoie was written to honour an order of nuns who have been carrying out community service in their city since 1861. The Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul are presented as “spiritual warriors” (10) who are social justice activists. They are seen in their full complexity as “lightning rods / for God’s grandeur— / grounded, otherworldly, / veiled and keenly tuned / to the world beyond the veil.” (22).

Each author wrote roughly half of the book’s poems, and these individual pieces weave together seamlessly to reveal the women behind the wimples, the work they conducted, both quotidian and religious, and their social activism. Freer mainly focuses in on fine detail, as in her poem about the sisters’ printing press where “every block of type [is] a moment” (10), and her evocations of schoolyards and chapels. By contrast, Lavoie’s poems tend to range more widely through time and distance, although she also brings crisp attention to details.

The notion of “service” is key to the book. It appears in the title and in several poems, including one that refers to the intriguing directive by St. Vincent de Paul, the saint to whom the order is dedicated, to ask forgiveness from “the broken … for helping them.” (5). This sense of humility in serving community is threaded through poems about the nuns’ work as teachers, health care workers and caregivers, about finding grace among the frustrations of red tape as they provide support to businesses, and about commitment to social causes despite exhortations to “Stay in your lane, Sisters” (25).)

The rest of the review can be accessed here.

https://poets.ca/review-of-serve-the-sorrowing-world-with-joy-by-meg-freer-and-chantel-lavoie/

A review of From the Frontenacs was published in the Frontenac News in September.

It is reprinted below

(Anne Archer launches new book of poetry, From the Frontenacs

Frontenac County’s resident flautist, Anne Archer, is set to release her second collection of poems, From the Frontenacs, at a launch at Novel Idea Bookstore in Kingston on September 15.

“My first book, Ich Heisse Clara, was about Clara Schumann and her relationship with Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. It came from my musical background, obviously, and it was a story that stuck me, it kind of became an obsession.”

Her new book is based on experiences from closer to home, much closer, in fact.

Archer lives on a back road, not far from Sharbot Lake, and she is a consistent, you might say persistent, walker.

“I take three walks a day,” she said, in different directions from my house, along the road and on some of the local trails.”

It is these walks that provided the inspiration, and subject matter for “From the Frontenacs”.

“My walks are very much meditative,” she said. I walk alone or with a small group of my Sharbot Lake buddies. The walks are where the poems came from,” she said.

The poems in From the Frontenacs are spare, and descriptive, invoking a very strong sense of place. They connect to the sounds, the weight of the air in different seasons, and the birds that share the landscape on Archer’s ritual walks.

“I tried, with these poems, to observe my physical environment as accurately as I could. Trying to talk about what is in front of my eyes. They are poems of observation as opposed to point of view poems.

Continuing with the hyper local theme of From the Frontenacs, the cover illustration and the images inside the book, are all taken from the work of printmaker Martina Field, who is Anne Archer’s neighbour, one of the few people who live within the range of her daily walks.

“I was really fortunate that Martina agreed to let me use her work. The images fit the words perfectly.”)