Emily Dickinson Goes Camping

“Follow me to the ends / of The Homestead, Emily said.”

Emily Dickinson Goes Camping and other Wildly Domestic Poems starts with a salute to a poet who has long been a presence in the author’s life. Karen Davidson’s new book begins with a collection of twenty poems that grew up around her affinity with Emily Dickinson’s often puzzling work. Into a vast and often dense array of scholarly commentary on Dickinson’s enigmatic ambiguity, Karen Davidson drops a cool sheaf of poems with a transparent twinkle in her eye.

As a poet and kindred spirit, she lifts up the subtle, wry, and serious humour often hidden under the surface of Emily Dickinson’s poems and in her unorthodox social and philosophical stance. This copacetic touch gives Emily Dickinson Goes Camping a poetic and literary aura of unique interest

Forty-two additional poems in four sections complete the book. They range in time and geography from the author’s home, garden, and community life in rural New Brunswick back to childhood on a Manitoba farm. In poem after poem, a distillation of language unfolds across the page that fulfills the promise of the subtitle. “Wildly domestic” is an unusual voice to hold in tension and harmony. But, like Emily Dickinson, Karen Davidson has made it the signature of her art.