Living with the Creatures of Light and Darkness: Collected Poems
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2024
Pages: 148
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2024
Pages: 146
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How many people actually end up living where they have always dreamed with the person who shares the same dream and discovered it to be beyond expectation? This book celebrates that place: through the mountains and desert, a mighty river flows with all the creatures it nurtures: in poems and pictures of love, elation, violence and loss. Each season unfolds and brings respite and renewal as people, flora, fauna and fish negotiate to survive and thrive with, and in spite of, one another.
Ehor Boyanowsky helped found the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, co-founded the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, served as president of the SFU Faculty Association, and twice as president of The Confederation of Faculty Associations of BC, as well as The Steelhead Society of BC, positions reflecting his major commitment to universities as founts of knowledge, to civil rights in Canada and to wild river and wild fish conservation. He now lives in the Thompson River Valley with his wife, Cristina Martini, his English setters and two cats at Nighthawk Ranch now a wildlife preserve.
“When wildfire came down from the mountain, Ehor Boyanowsky sipped a gin and tonic, pondering what to do if it crossed the river and went into the trees around his home. Running wasn’t in the plan, but fighting it was. Well, what would you expect of a man who fished with Ted Hughes and Jack Hemingway? Ehor has a fierce appetite for life and the wild. It shows in Living with the Creatures of Light and Darkness, crafted on the banks of the mighty Thompson River.”
Mark Hume, author of Reading the Water and River of the Angry Moon.
“Boyanowsky, with conviction and precision, celebrates lived experience in the fertile nexus between the human and natural worlds.”
J.A. Wainwright, author of Landscape and Desire: Poems Selected and New.
"In 2009 Ehor Boyanowsky published a lucid and affectionate memoir of fishing with Ted Hughes in western Canada, Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts: in the wild with Ted Hughes (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre). The photographs alone indicate how much fun Ted, and later with Nick, had in Ehor’s company. He also fished with Ted at Grimersta on the Isle of Harris as well as in Devon, staying at Court Green. Boyanowsky’s recall of conversations apparently verbatim may seem surprising, but his sense of Hughes’s personality is sensitive and powerful: ‘shy, gently quiet’ in Canada, but ‘large, boisterous and welcoming’ on home ground (2009: 133).
It would be a mistake for Hughes scholars to focus only on the one section of this first collection of poems that contains a long poem about Boyanowsky’s relationship with Hughes. It distils much of what is in his memoir through the frame of that magical and memorable Westminster Abbey memorial service. This book offers a context for that relationship by revealing the author’s interests, culture and, indeed, his own personality. Hughes’s own take on this context is best read in ‘The Bear’ (CP 845) which was apparently ‘modelled on’ an entry in the Dean River fishing camp logbook (105; 2009: 45)).
The first section is titled ‘Occasional Poems’, many of which are written for family and friends, almost always in the outdoor environment, frequently with fishing metaphors: ‘no catch and release ever after’ is the crux line of a love poem (22). The remainder of the collection comes in numbered sections each with the title ‘Rivers of the Heart’. The politics of advocacy for wild rivers, in which Boyanowsky has been active, hardly surface from the celebration of the land and its creatures, but do so explicitly at one point:
No man, no corporation, no government,
Can replace by reconstruction
The fish, the bears, the ancient trees, the insects
Once they are gone (126)
We know that at one point in his life Hughes had considered moving to join his brother Gerald in Australia. Boyanowsky writes:
For Ted Hughes, British Columbia was
The road not taken
Around our campfire on the Dean,
A barrage of northern lights rippling and crackling overhead
He said how coming to BC had rekindled a part of him
Long dormant
Since his brother had moved away
And that in spirit and gesture,
I reminded him of his brother. (103)
To the extent that this is true, Hughes readers might want to find out more from these vivid poems from a lifetime of engagements with deserts, rivers, birds, fish, dogs and children."
Terry Gifford, Ted Hughes Society Journal
How many people actually end up living where they have always dreamed with the person who shares the same dream and discovered it to be beyond expectation? This book celebrates that place: through the mountains and desert, a mighty river flows with all the creatures it nurtures: in poems and pictures of love, elation, violence and loss. Each season unfolds and brings respite and renewal as people, flora, fauna and fish negotiate to survive and thrive with, and in spite of, one another.
Ehor Boyanowsky helped found the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, co-founded the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, served as president of the SFU Faculty Association, and twice as president of The Confederation of Faculty Associations of BC, as well as The Steelhead Society of BC, positions reflecting his major commitment to universities as founts of knowledge, to civil rights in Canada and to wild river and wild fish conservation. He now lives in the Thompson River Valley with his wife, Cristina Martini, his English setters and two cats at Nighthawk Ranch now a wildlife preserve.
“When wildfire came down from the mountain, Ehor Boyanowsky sipped a gin and tonic, pondering what to do if it crossed the river and went into the trees around his home. Running wasn’t in the plan, but fighting it was. Well, what would you expect of a man who fished with Ted Hughes and Jack Hemingway? Ehor has a fierce appetite for life and the wild. It shows in Living with the Creatures of Light and Darkness, crafted on the banks of the mighty Thompson River.”
Mark Hume, author of Reading the Water and River of the Angry Moon.
“Boyanowsky, with conviction and precision, celebrates lived experience in the fertile nexus between the human and natural worlds.”
J.A. Wainwright, author of Landscape and Desire: Poems Selected and New.
"In 2009 Ehor Boyanowsky published a lucid and affectionate memoir of fishing with Ted Hughes in western Canada, Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts: in the wild with Ted Hughes (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre). The photographs alone indicate how much fun Ted, and later with Nick, had in Ehor’s company. He also fished with Ted at Grimersta on the Isle of Harris as well as in Devon, staying at Court Green. Boyanowsky’s recall of conversations apparently verbatim may seem surprising, but his sense of Hughes’s personality is sensitive and powerful: ‘shy, gently quiet’ in Canada, but ‘large, boisterous and welcoming’ on home ground (2009: 133).
It would be a mistake for Hughes scholars to focus only on the one section of this first collection of poems that contains a long poem about Boyanowsky’s relationship with Hughes. It distils much of what is in his memoir through the frame of that magical and memorable Westminster Abbey memorial service. This book offers a context for that relationship by revealing the author’s interests, culture and, indeed, his own personality. Hughes’s own take on this context is best read in ‘The Bear’ (CP 845) which was apparently ‘modelled on’ an entry in the Dean River fishing camp logbook (105; 2009: 45)).
The first section is titled ‘Occasional Poems’, many of which are written for family and friends, almost always in the outdoor environment, frequently with fishing metaphors: ‘no catch and release ever after’ is the crux line of a love poem (22). The remainder of the collection comes in numbered sections each with the title ‘Rivers of the Heart’. The politics of advocacy for wild rivers, in which Boyanowsky has been active, hardly surface from the celebration of the land and its creatures, but do so explicitly at one point:
No man, no corporation, no government,
Can replace by reconstruction
The fish, the bears, the ancient trees, the insects
Once they are gone (126)
We know that at one point in his life Hughes had considered moving to join his brother Gerald in Australia. Boyanowsky writes:
For Ted Hughes, British Columbia was
The road not taken
Around our campfire on the Dean,
A barrage of northern lights rippling and crackling overhead
He said how coming to BC had rekindled a part of him
Long dormant
Since his brother had moved away
And that in spirit and gesture,
I reminded him of his brother. (103)
To the extent that this is true, Hughes readers might want to find out more from these vivid poems from a lifetime of engagements with deserts, rivers, birds, fish, dogs and children."
Terry Gifford, Ted Hughes Society Journal