The Summer at Planet Earth Poetry

June 29  Heather Spears and Yvonne Blomer

Canadian writer and artist Heather Spears was educated at the University of British Columbia, The Vancouver School of Art and the University of Copenhagen. She is divorced and has 4 children. She has lived in Denmark since 1962. She has held over 75 solo exhibitions and published 11collections of poetry and 3 novels of speculative fiction (1991-96), the Moonfall Trilogy. The Flourish, (04) a novel of crime fiction and the family, came out in Canada and was republished in Europe as A Muted Voice (09). The Creative Eye (07), is the first of a series on visual perception. She has 3 books of drawings: Drawn from the Fire (89) Massacre (90); and Line by Line (02). Drawings from the Newborn (86), The Panum Poems (96) and Required Reading (00) contain both poems and full-page drawings. Her latest collection of poetry, I can still draw (08), was shortlisted for the Lowther Memorial Award. She has illustrated numerous books and articles; and also draws courtroom, dance, theatre and childbirth. Specialising in drawing children, in particular premature and other threatened infants, she travels widely and has drawn in hospitals in the Middle East, Europe and America.

Yvonne Blomer is Planet Earth Poetry's Artistic Director.  She will be launching her second full collection of poems The Book of Places published this spring by Black Moss Press.

 Yvonne Blomer lives in Victoria, BC where she works as a poet, memoirist, writing teacher, event organizer and mom.  She was born in Zimbabwe and came to Canada when she was two years old. With her husband she has taught in Japan, cycled in Southeast Asia and lived in the UK where she completed an MA in Creative Writing: Poetry.  Her poems have twice been shortlisted for the CBC Literary awards and have appeared in literary journals in Canada, the US, Japan and the UK.  Her first collection of poetry, a broken mirror, fallen leaf (Ekstasis Editions), was shortlisted for The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 2007. She is the host/organizer of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series in Victoria, B.C.  In 2012 Yvonne’s illustrated series of poems “Bicycle Brand Journey” will launch with Jack Pine Press.

Serious, playful, and governed by the eye’s apprehension of the familiar as well as the shockingly new, Yvonne Blomer’s Book of Places takes us cycling through Asian landscapes, Britain’s stone cathedrals, and the intimate landmarks of home, where these poems accumulate earthly wonders: rivers and rain, animals, leaves, bamboo’s hollow knock against stone. She drops the pebble of a word into a mirror pool, and its ripples expand into the still pond of the reader’s mind.  

                                Pamela Porter, author of "I'll be Watching", "Cathedral" and 

                                Governor General's Award winner "The Crazy Man"

Planet Earth Poetry extends thanks to The Canada Council for the Arts and The League of Canadian Poets for funding this reading.