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Crow Gulch

Crow Gulch

By (author):

Shortlisted, NL Reads, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and Raymond Souster Award
Longlisted, First Nation Communities READ Award

From the author: I cannot let the story of Crow Gulch — the story of my family and, subsequently, my own story — go untold. This book is my attempt to resurrect dialogue and story, to honour who and where I come from, to remind Corner Brook of the glaring omission in its social history.

In his debut poetry collection, Douglas... Read More

Shortlisted, NL Reads, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and Raymond Souster Award
Longlisted, First Nation Communities READ Award

From the author: I cannot let the story of Crow Gulch — the story of my family and, subsequently, my own story — go untold. This book is my attempt to resurrect dialogue and story, to honour who and where I come from, to remind Corner Brook of the glaring omission in its social history.

In his debut poetry collection, Douglas Walbourne-Gough reflects on the legacy of a community that sat on the shore of the Bay of Islands, less than two kilometres west of downtown Corner Brook.

Crow Gulch began as a temporary shack town to house migrant workers in the 1920s during the construction of the pulp and paper mill. After the mill was complete, some of the residents, many of Indigenous ancestry, settled there permanently — including the poet’s great-grandmother Amelia Campbell and her daughter, Ella — and those the locals called the “jackytars,” a derogatory epithet used to describe someone of mixed French and Mi’kmaq descent. Many remained there until the late 1970s, when the settlement was forcibly abandoned and largely forgotten.

Walbourne-Gough lyrically sifts through archival memory and family accounts, resurrecting story and conversation, to patch together a history of a people and place. Here he finds his own identity within the legacy of Crow Gulch and reminds those who have forgotten of a glaring omission in history.

Awards

2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
2021 NL Reads
2020 Raymond Souster Award
2020 First Nation Communities READ Award

Editorial reviews

"These poems challenge derogatory erasures and rework them by telling stories about the communitys inhabitants drawn from oral histories family memory and imagining"
- Kim Trainor
- PRISM

"WalbourneGoughs poems are intimate in moments personal His lyrical style grabs hold of you and doesnt let go"
- Shannon WebbCampbell
- Muskrat Magazine

"Bent low and clund to a coast WalbourneGough lets the land shape him Brilliant and weathered observation interlaces family and archive to render present and necessary the memory of Crow Gulch Here is a days labour a fretting walk along the tracks a house that lets in snow at the seams grandmothers kitchen Hear still her peals of laughter against the far shore and all that lives on in this book"
- Cecily Nicholson

"One of the most captivating elements of Douglas WalbourneGoughs Crow Gulch is the powerful humanism running through the collection"
- James M Fisher
- The Miramichi Reader

"I especially enjoyed Influences a poem that looks back on the places food music and people"
- Consumed by Ink

"Crow Gulch announces an important poet The differences Douglas WalbourneGough explores between class and ethnicities are as hard as Newfoundlands rock as shifting as the foundations of a forcibly resettled Crow Gulch This book is a conversation between a rude landscape the displaced or dispossessed and a narrator searching for belonging"
- Stephanie McKenzie

"These deeply engaging poems courageous shrewdly observed disillusioned give sharp personal expression to the harshbeautiful landscape of western Newfoundland and the human community precariously stubbornly rooted there A sense of conflict drives through this work a reflection of the tradiitonal struggle to gain a living from the sea and rocky land but also a raw exploration of the conflict between poverty and privilege honesty and propriety"
- John Steffler

"One of the most impressive aspects of WalbourneGoughs writing is how well he renders physicality the physicality of land and body into poetry"
- Emily SkovNielsen
- The Fiddlehead

"Following his ancestors for whom a name could be so wrought with work so heavy now with love the poet treats Crow Gulch as a place and a name that persist preceding and dragging behind him like a loose bootlace"
- Melanie Dennis Unrau
- Canadian Literature

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Book details

Page length: 80 Publication Date: 2019-09-17 Book themes: POETRY / Native American, POETRY Canadian Indigenous,  Publisher: Goose Lane Editions ISBN: 9781773101019

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Description

<p><b>Shortlisted, NL Reads, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and Raymond Souster Award<br/>Longlisted, First Nation Communities READ Award</b></p><p>From the author: I cannot let the story of <i>Crow Gulch</i> — the story of my family and, subsequently, my own story — go untold. This book is my attempt to resurrect dialogue and story, to honour who and where I come from, to remind Corner Brook of the glaring omission in its social history.</p><p>In his debut poetry collection, Douglas Walbourne-Gough reflects on the legacy of a community that sat on the shore of the Bay of Islands, less than two kilometres west of downtown Corner Brook.</p><p><i>Crow Gulch</i> began as a temporary shack town to house migrant workers in the 1920s during the construction of the pulp and paper mill. After the mill was complete, some of the residents, many of Indigenous ancestry, settled there permanently — including the poet’s great-grandmother Amelia Campbell and her daughter, Ella — and those the locals called the “jackytars,” a derogatory epithet used to describe someone of mixed French and Mi’kmaq descent. Many remained there until the late 1970s, when the settlement was forcibly abandoned and largely forgotten.</p><p>Walbourne-Gough lyrically sifts through archival memory and family accounts, resurrecting story and conversation, to patch together a history of a people and place. Here he finds his own identity within the legacy of Crow Gulch and reminds those who have forgotten of a glaring omission in history.</p>

Additional information

Weight 0.18 kg
Dimensions 8.5 × 5.5 × 0.3125 in