Time Travels Light
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This is Alice Major’s first collection of poetry, published by Rowan Books as one of the first titles under The Books Collective—an innovative attempt in the early 1990s to provide a way for a group of small presses in Edmonton, Alberta with shared resources in areas such as marketing and distributing books.
The collection’s five sections set out main themes that she has developed the poet ever since: science as a source of metaphor, the human relationships of family, and a wry sense of humour.
Poems cover a complex of subjects . . . Time as physics, time as geometry, time as housecleaning. Time as the experience of emigration and displacement. Time as politics. Time as cleaning out the fridge. And the long central poem, "Words Collected and Imposed on Time," explores what it means to think of time as a "fourth dimension" that can somehow link the poet in northern Canada to the simultaneous release of Nelson Mandela from prison, a hemisphere away.
The cover of Time Travels Light is illustrated with “Big Bang Tennis” by Colleen Philippi.
Published by Rowan Books
ISBN 1-895836-01-8
Time Travels Light is out of print, but copies are available on Abebooks and a few are available by contacting the author through this website.
Experience a poem
Audio: Time Travel is a One-Way Street
Text Poem – puce fairy book
Text Poem – Words selected and imposed on time
Recognition
Shortlisted for the City of Edmonton Book Prize
Reviews
>> . . . Major has a great deal of fun investigating the connection between quantum mechanics and the laundry, between physics and housework. And there are moments here, as in the poem, "Cemetery near Redstone Reserve, when the application of that cosmic view of the connection between emotions, matter and events makes a reader think there just might be a god, after all.
– Edmonton Journal, January 10, 1993
>> Alice Major's second collection was published by Bayeux Arts in 1999 and was was shortlisted for the City of Edmonton Book Prize. In Time Travels Light, Major explores the nature of time and memory, and examines the various transformations that occur in the lives of individuals and families with humour, feeling and depth. Her images are precise and memorable.
– Calgary Herald, 1993
>> With deceptive simplicity, Major aligns herself with the elements. She manages to call up electromagnetism, Fibonacci numbers, relativity and entangle them in our day to day world, recasting much of ordinary experience at a mythological level.
– Poetry Canada, Vol. 14, No.1
