free book sale

They were giving away books to keep at the library. I expected hordes of people to be there, ravaging the shelves, but what I found was an utterly silent room.

There were four people there. We all just silently shuffled around from table to table.

I touched so many books, felt their weight, ran my fingers across their pages and spines. I was experiencing their gravity, connecting with their physicality as much as with their words. I was aware that a wonderful moment was occurring, right then, to me.

When I left, my arms could barely contain my finds:

Without by Donald Hall 

The Door by Margaret Atwood

Embryo Words by Margaret Lawrence

Spin Dry by Greg Hollingshead

Island by Alistair MacLeod

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

What We Leave Behind by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay

A Likely Story by Robert Kroetsch

All of Baba's Children by Myrna Kostach

Since Daisy Creek by W.O. Mitchell

Enduring Prose by various authors (among them are Churchill, Stephen Leacock, W.O. Mitchell, Plato, and Leo Tolstoy)

and several back issues of Other Voices.

My happiest find was Without, a book I've never owned but have read several times. The first was during research at the library for a paper on the connections between grief and creativity. I read the whole book in one sitting, hunched over in a chair at a table in the study section, pulling my hat down lower on my forehead to hide my tears.

These are poems that tore right through me. They bear such personal significance to me that as I read them, even now, I think, "I have written that exact thing." I have thought a long time about grief.

Each of these books is such a lovely surprise. It is good to have them as my own. It is good to hold them, to think about so many Canadian authors (and some others) and place my hands onto their landscapes.

It was a good day.