Hard Bargain Road
2021 / Canadian Poetry / $19.95
9781554472321 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Available from these excellent independent book sellers: Chat Noir Books, New Liskeard; Jessica’s Book Nook, Thornbury; Zak’s, Sundridge.
From the publisher:
Susan Haldane offers an intimate view of contemporary life in a rural community. Foregoing typical bucolic or bleak tropes of rural life, her poems find focus in the complex, incessant negotiations involved in farming’s ever-shifting relationship with landscape, livestock, seasons, weather, history and neighbours. Direct, plain spoken, this collection recalls the frank wistful and stubborn persistence of a bluegrass hymn, a song for a community that will not be defined from without. “If it surprises you to hear / a farmer speak of love,” writes Haldane, “then / you’ve had the wrong meaning all along.”
About the title:
I’m a bit obsessed with maps. While looking at a map of my region, northeastern Ontario, I noticed a road called Hardbargain on Manitoulin Island. It seemed a perfect metaphor for the difficult trade-offs made by those who live close to the land, or make their living from the land. Now I see there are Hardbargain roads all over the place.
About the Tweedsmuir Histories:
Several poems in Hard Bargain Road draw from a local history called Our Chisholm Story, part of the Tweedsmuir community history project undertaken by the Women’s Institutes of Ontario in the mid-1900s. More than 1,100 branches of the WI recorded the history of settlers, agriculture, industry, schools, churches and families in their communities.
Picking Stones
2018 / Poetry / $4.95
9781554471928 / Pamphlet / 32 pp
The Devil’s Whim Occasional Chapbook Series: No. 39
Susan Haldane 