Böcker av April Bulmer

Theodora Hart is a prairie woman who suffers loss but whose unique faith burns bright. She is rooted in the land of her youth and despite bad weather blooms strong like the August sun. Jesus also lights her heart. These brief poems tell of Theodora's grief and the shafts of wheat she pounds and kneads into the bread of life.

April's potent metaphors are modern-day elixirs.

The poems in this chapbook are based on the names of paint colours. Award-winning writer April Bulmer collected samples from local hardware stores and used the names as titles for her poems. As she wrote, a short narrative developed: a story of Canadian soulmates who have reincarnated. The female narrator recalls earlier lives in other countries. Whether Chinese, Black, Indigenous or White the couple is always spiritually inclined. In this incarnation, they marry and heal each other. The woman loves her husband, a warlock and surgeon who soothes her nervous condition. He is a medicine man who salves her soul. The woman offers him her artistic gifts. Their love is deeply rooted in the mystical history of this planet. It is nuanced by the colours April studied while writing these unique poems.

Blurbs:44 WordsIn her new book, And With Thy Spirit, award-winning poet and mystic, April Bulmer, speaks in the tongues of many women based on her visions of past lives. Even her favourite tree is a familiar old soul and "bows his stiff knees/ to weather."198 WordsAnd With Thy Spirit is a new book of poetry in which author, April Bulmer, unravels the story of her soul like gauze from a bandaged wound. Confident in the Eastern philosophy of reincarnation: the concept that we begin a life after biological death in a new body (human, animal or spiritual), she describes the garden of women who bloom like damp blossoms from her fertile womb. She recalls the stories of their roots, the energy of their suns and moons. Life after life, the Lord has taken her, often in the dim "when shadows genuflect/ on buffalo skin." A feminine soul deeply entrenched in Native culture and ritual her God limps for her like "an old coyote/ past miracle sites/ and stones of pagans./ Through fallen fields/ where the living send/ their prayers." Her women have also enjoyed the company of many men. Lucille Sky, for instance, walks the river with her lover their "souls speaking tongue: canoes and fish/ and the God of blood." She wants Johnny Nanticoke's brown hand on her breast "like a shadow/ on Grandmother Moon." April's ghostly incarnations often come to her in "the moments before sleep," their hair wild with dream.