On our visit to the Chapters bookstore in Regina, SK, this week, my companion pointed out that the computer showed three copies of Exile on a Grid Road on the shelves.
I found them at the beginning of the Canadian Poetry section.
And yes, I know Banks comes after Acorn in the alphabet, though that may be news to some. So when I reshelved my poetry collection after this iPhone photo, I placed all of the copies in a somewhat more traditional alpha-order… Right between Milton Acorn and Lorna Crozier. How cool is that!
Then again, my poems were originally nestling up against a hard cover edition of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, which is pretty cool, too…
(And yes, I also know Crozier’ The Wrong Cat is also out of sequence, but I didn’t feel like reorganizing the entire shelf.)
But look at the other names here!
I’m delighted to see Shelley Banks also sharing space on this Canadian Poetry shelf with Ken Babstock, Christian Bok, Ann Carson, Leonard Cohen, Robert Curry, Michael Crummy, Gerald Hill, Jeanette Lynes, Peter Midgley, Dennis Lee, Marilyn Dumont, Lynda Monahan, Cassidy McFadzean and Jane Munro! (Someone seriously doesn’t know their alphabet if they are placing books — Lee’s and Dumont’s — together by colour in the midst of the Ms! But I’m taking this to mean that poetry books in Regina are very well browsed, and that’s a lovely thing!)
On the shelf above, there are books about/by Chaucer, Dracula, Hunter S. Thompson and Tolkein, with Angelou, Baudelaire, Berryman, Bukowski, Breckt, Dante, Rumi and the Epic of Gilgamesh on the shelf below.
Now that’s great company!
