Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst, two of the most celebrated Canadian writers, will be reading at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre on Saturday, Nov. 2.
Zwicky is a poet, philosopher and essayist. She is also a committed environmentalist whose ecological sensibility informs much of her lyrical style and poetic imagination. Her Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, for which she won the Governor General’s Award for poetry, have the musical tonality and rhythm of jazz and classical music.
Her latest works in poetry and philosophy – The Long Walk and The Experience of Meaning – are a reflection on environmental collapse, extending her previous mediation on colonial barbarism and ecocide.
Bringhurst is a polymath – linguist, typographer, poet, translator, essayist – whose great work on Haida’s classical mythtellers, A Story as Sharp as a Knife, has been praised as “a book that changes the way we see things.” His approach to literature is eclectic, taking inspiration from the Bible, the ancient Greek poets and the epics of the Haida.
In 2018, Zwicky and Bringhurst collaborated on a philosophical diptych – Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis, on “the death of the planet versus the death of the individual,” a small book exploring the primordial existential question currently facing our generation.
The Sunshine Coast Arts Centre is located at Trail and Medusa in Sechelt. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is by donation.
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