Bleg Pays Off

award-winning jacket design by Alberta artist Susan Menzies.

This is what it looked like -- "Sun Over Darkness Prevail" award-winning jacket design by Alberta artist Susan Menzies.

“So gentle and mild is the far-distant air,
And the forests and fields are so clean and so rare,
Blue forest on white gleaming prairie,
The grandeur of nature to all is unfurled,
It seems as if spring could fill up the whole world,
Even up to the cold glaciers’ eyrie…”
(Stephan G. Stephansson, September Snow)

I often wonder what the point is of blogging, but then someone reads an old post and sends me great news — like today, when I got an email from Richard White’s daughter letting me know that an LP I love, Sun Over Darkness Prevail, has been digitally reissued. The album sets to music poems by the Icelandic-Canadian poet Stephan G. Stephansson.

I first heard this music when I was at school in Edmonton. I played the album in my 10th-floor office a lot and it’s linked in my mind to the wide skies and far fields, as well as the graduate school excitement that’s fueled so much of my writing and my ideas of the ideal life. I would look out past the misty edge of the city, pale blue in the distance under an even paler sky, and listen to songs about the very place I was looking at.

To me, Alberta was The Last Best West. I loved everything about it. But I had grown up in smaller, more settled countryside, and Stephansson wrote about that too. His poetry described the view from my parents’ house as well as the view from my Edmonton window:

Pennsylvania mists, July 2013

Pennsylvania mists, July 2013

“When fields of grain have caught a gleam of moonlight
But dark the ground —
A pearl-grey mist has filled to over-flowing
The dells around;
Some golden stars are peeping forth to brighten
The eastern wood —
Then I am resting out upon my doorstep
In nature’s mood.”
(Stephan G. Stephansson, Evening)

It was thirty years ago. Since graduate school, my life has been even better every year — except in music.  So many of my old LPs disappeared in one move or another — I lost half of them, my winter boots, and a set of shark jaws to Canada Post, and more to the move from my parents’ to Milwaukee –but now I can enjoy one of them again.  Thank you, Anna White!

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