Daniel David Moses recommends Burning in this Midnight Dream by Louise Bernice Halfe
June is Indigenous Book Club Month. Every day in June, CBC Books published a recommendation from an Indigenous writer for a book by another Indigenous author.
Daniel David Moses recommends Burning in this Midnight Dream by Louise Bernice Halfe.
"Of 2016's exceptional crop of poetry books by Aboriginal writers, it's Burning in this Midnight Dream by Louise Bernice Halfe that I know I'll go to again. It's Halfe's fourth collection and though hers has always been a compelling voice, operating in that mysterious space between the Cree and English languages, between contemporary Cree sensibility (where the past is present) and the contemporary prairie culture (she did serve as poet laureate for Saskatchewan) which looks only to the future's horizon (no wonder we keep tripping over debris!), Burning in this Midnight Dream seems to have brought a lot more of her first language's wisdom into the English most of us monolinguals make our world from. That her subject matter is the now more familiar and familial damage of residential schools, that she renders it in language both simple and deep and enthralling, brings more of the world into our literature and makes it a better place. It's a thrilling achievement."
Daniel David Moses is a playwright and poet whose writing has been translated into Chinese, Czech, French, German and Spanish. Some of his works include Almighty Voice and His Wife and Coyote City: A Play in Two Acts, which was nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award for drama in 1991.