Böcker av Jane Spavold Tims

mnemonic is a book of precisely worded and carefully phrased poems that carry the reader on a journey through the soundscapes of the author's home terrain-rural New Brunswick. Jane Tims, botanist, land use planner, and environmental conservationist, employs her keen observation and well-honed writing skills to portray the sounds that populate meadow and forest, emerge along lakes and rivers, and typically occur in domestic terrains. Birdsong commands primary attention and flows like a canopy across each section of this book. Jane shares her drawings of birds, which add the image of form to the aura of music. An orchestra of other surrounding sounds prompt the author's poetic rendering, revealing a world chock-full of interesting information for those alert to its resonance. mnemonic offers a doorway in which to first stand, and then engage a journey from poem to poem into the author's immersive experience of the great world's soundscapes and birdsong.

The unusual thing about in the shelter of the covered bridge is the unity of focus the poet-artist-biologist has achieved with this book. While each element of the book has its own narrative stance, the poems, the drawings, and the natural history notes come together in a way that has an appealing and satisfying unity for ear, eye, and mind.Jane is not a poet who puts all her aesthetic eggs in one basket. She moves easily between modes of expression. She is a connoisseur of land and life, an emissary for the intertwining stories of natural history and human culture.Readers attracted by the poems and drawings pick up a good deal of natural and cultural history as well. Readers attracted to the natural and cultural history have their knowledge graced with the sounds of wind and water, and with the images of plants and animals that live "in the shelter of the covered bridge."With her poetic, artistic, and research skills steering the ship, Jane is now sailing out once again into the geographic by-ways and cultural history of the province. She has a similar book project under way on the environments and cultural settings of one-room schoolhouses.I have no doubt she will offer up another voyage for ear, eye, and mind, and that we will again be culturally enriched by her inspiration and good efforts.