An Open Door in the Landscape - Tapa blanda

In Elisabeth Harvor's poetry collection An Open Door in the Landscape, the real and the surreal exist side by side. Doors open on snow, war, influenza, summer and winter oceans, the efficiency of obsession, and men who can dance. In yet another world, on a hot city morning in our most recent century, the tiny industrial screech of insects in August gardens becomes a backdrop for a lovesick woman waiting on a veranda for the postman to bring her relief "in the last era before e-mail, in the last era before high tech gives short shrift to longing." Other poems shine out of more fleeting events, each poem radiating with the emotional intensity of its moment.

Elisabeth Harvor, a poet, short story writer, and novelist, grew up in New Brunswick's Kennebecasis Valley. One of her three short story collections, Let Me Be the One (1996), was a finalist for the Governor General's Award. She won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for her first book of poetry, Fortress of Chairs (1992). In 2000, she published her first novel, Excessive Joy Injures the Heart.