The mythopoetic seasonal life of islanders and their love of being islanded, are captured with luminous clarity in Fertig’s exceptional new book; her first in 14 years. "I have always been struck by three qualities in Mona Fertig’s poetry: a sensuousness, an honouring of the sometimes beautiful, sometimes awkwardly real world at the poet’s feet, and a spiritual density that cracks through anywhere. Mona has one of the strongest voices among our poets." ––John Lent Through the lyrical, the local and the natural world mixed with the pepper of folklore and the salt of the personal, remarkable shifts of the first person plural and the omniscient narrator are woven. The intuitive exchange between sorrow and delight are deeply rooted in the poems’ emotional wisdom and rhythm. Beauty and hope abound. Three sections open the collection: Village Life, Huddling, Joies de’ Livre, and three powerful long socio-political poems, The Weather is Political, Sleepless in Strathcona and This is Paradise, complete the book. “The island felt timeless, a place where happiness could exist.”