Past lives: Chronicles of Canadian Paleontology |
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Past lives: Chronicles of Canadian Paleontology The Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan
Even though the poetry of Miss Binks touches the very geological
soul of the province, her work has been sadly neglected by the
government geologists at the Geological Survey of Saskatchewan - possibly
because of envy
As the founder of the geo-literary school of poetry, Sarah Binks, the
Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan, naturally drew heavily on geological
imagery in her writings. Paul Hiebert, her chronicler, pointed out that no
lesser a person than the Literary Editor of The Horsebreeder's
Gazette enthused about Sarah, "She expresses, not only the soul
of Saskatchewan, but its very bones; the Jurassic, Triassic, or the plain
Assic, are all there". In her poetry we find geological themes
mingled with rejected love in a characteristic Binksian manner:
Man, who is a creature of the moment jist,
Is yet a fossil in micaceous schist,
To-morrow's day, his bones are bleached and bent,
A something for the archeologist.
Man who has spurned and made my heart to hurt,
Is but a creature and thing of dirt,
A thing of mud, of clay, volcanic ash,
Old brick, cincers, broken cement, chert.
Hiebert has difficulty maintaining a biographer's dispassion when he
effuses over Sarah's epic poem "Up from the Magma and Back
Again,"
"Those haunting lines ... express more than an oil well. They
speak of us of the Upper Silurian. They speak to us of the Lower Galician.
They speak to us of the Plasticine, the overburden, the underburden, the
chert concretions, the Great Ice age. Nay, the whole super epic breathes
in and breathes out the geological soul of Saskatchewan".
Further reading:
Hiebert, Paul. |
1974: |
Sarah Binks. Oxford University Press. |
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