VIRTUAL READING | The Poetry of Eleonore Schönmaier

Details and registration

Join Eleonore Schönmaier for a virtual reading from her latest work, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete, plus selections from her three other collections. The event will include live streamed piano music from the home of composer and pianist Panos Gklistis.

Eleonore Schönmaier is an award winning author and poet. She divides her time between Canada and coastal Europe.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete

A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. By centring her experiential empathy on a history of racism and poverty, she guides us into better ways of being. Intimate reflections are contrasted with geopolitical and environmental concerns as Schönmaier's fierce intelligence focuses on what is most essential in our lives.

Dust Blown Side of the Journey

At times apocalyptic and other times passionate and intimate, the poems in Eleonore Schönmaier’s Dust Blown Side of the Journey show the beauty of the lived and natural world in both wilderness and urban settings. Reflecting a childhood in the northern Canadian boreal forest, combined with an adult life lived without borders, Eleonore Schönmaier’s vivid and sensual language invites the reader to fully join in and enjoy the journey.

Wavelengths of Your Song

A stunning unfolding of memory, Wavelengths of Your Song juxtaposes a childhood in the northern Canadian wilderness with the adventures of an international creative life. Genuine environmentalism is at the heart of this collection. Migrations of birds and humans lend their songs to the vivid writing and a tangible, sensory reality emerges from their sounds. Music by Beethoven and Rzewski, paintings by Norval Morrisseau and Kandinsky, and writing by Kafka and Celan, inspire Eleonore Schönmaier's poetry.

Treading Fast Rivers

A poet of striking maturity, Eleonore Schönmaier writes of icy depths and serene pools with equal ease. Unflinching when charting the terrains of human nature and the natural wilderness, she travels to such far-flung landscapes as Crete and Portugal, and the watery depths of the Sargasso Sea. Closer to home she looks beneath the surface of Northern mining communities and explores an abandoned lighthouse on the Atlantic coast.