George Elliott Clarke, Execution Poems (Gaspereau Press) $49.95 ISBN 1-894031-34-2 / $179.99 ISBN 1-894031-35-0.

In 1949, George Elliott Clarke's cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton, were hanged for murder in Fredericton, New Brunswick. These are their poems. The book was hand-set in lead type and printed on a letterpress using traditional methods, and is available from the publisher in a limited edition of six hardcovers and sixty softcovers. The woodcut by Wesley W. Bates shown here depicts a hammer in a noose.

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia. In 1998, vhe was awarded the prestigious Portia White Prize. His most recent book, Beatrice Chancy, was shortlisted in 2000 for the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Dartmouth Book & Writing Award for Fiction, and his Whylah Falls won the 1991 Archibald Lampman Award. He is currently lecturing at the University of Toronto.

Jennifer Corson, The Resourceful Renovator: A Gallery of Ideas for Reusing Building Materials (Key Porter) $28.95 ISBN 1-55263-292-X.

By imaginatively and creatively resuing materials, a resourceful renovator conserves energy, saves money, and creates space that is uniquely beautiful. From moving entire houses to salvaging a surprising range of materials, this lavish compendium of design ideas will inspire you to push the limits of your creativity. You'll never see an old door or window frame in the same way again.

Halifax writer Jennifer Corson holds a master's of architecture from the Technical University of Nova Scotia and is the co-founder of Solterre Design, an award-winning green design firm. She creates and hosts a Canadian television series called "The Resourceful Renovator." She is past chair of the Used Building Materials Association, a North American nonprofit organization, and president of Renovators Resource Inc., a used building material store.

Mary Alice Downie and John Downie, Danger in Disguise (Roussan) $8.95 ISBN 1-896184-72-3.

Raised secretly in Normandy, Scottish born Jamie Macpherson and his father have been on the run all his life. On his fourteenth birthday, they are forced to flee by his father's enemies once more, and become separated. Jamie is press-ganged by the British navy and arrives in the port of Quebec just as General Wolfe's siege of the city begins. When he accused of spying for the French, he must decide whose side he is on.

Mary Alice Downie is a veteran children's author, with work ranging from picture books to folktales to historical fiction. Husband John Downie provides the Scottish connection in this re-creation of Canadian history. This is the third novel they have written together, after Honor Bound and Alison's Ghosts. They live in Kingston and frequently visit their daughter, son-in-law and grandson Sam in Halifax.

Deborah Hale, The Elusive Bride (Harlequin Historicals) $5.99 ISBN 0-373-29139-6.

Marriage meant safety. To protect her home and people, Cecily Tyrell would marry the devil himself - and if rumour held any truth, she would mayhap do so. A royal command bound her to wed Lord Rowan DeCourtenay, a knight of some renown... but a widower of shadowed reputation. Cecily alone made Rowan yearn to dismiss the guard around the citadel of his heart. Would their love, born in disguise and adventure, survive when all his soul's dark secrets were exposed?

Born in Moncton and raised in Kouchibouguac and Saint John, Deborah studied Special Eduation at the University of New Brunswick. During a fifteen year long search into her family's geneology, Deborah uncovered fascinating true stories that fueled her true passions - writing and history. The result was her award winning first novel, My Lord Protector. This is her fourth book with Harlequin Historicals.

Glen Hancock, My Real Name Is Charley (Gaspereau Press) $19.95 ISBN 1-894031-36-9.

Like many small towns in North America, Wolfville, Nova Scotia experienced dramatic change in the last century. For no one were those changes more dramatic than for those born in its opening decades -- those who witnessed the transition that took place in society following the depression and the World Wars. In this book, Wolfville native Glen Hancock revisits the town of his boyhood to catalogue the comings and goings of the pre-war community, from church to commerce, civic pride to prejudice and planting to harvest.

After serving overseas with the RCAF during the Second World War, Glen Hancock established himself as a newspaper writer, editor and syndicated columnist. In the mid-1950s, he accepted a public relations position with Imperial Oil, working in a variety of capacities for over 20 years. He was involved in the formation of the School of Journalism at the University of Kings College, Halifax, where he lectured, and from which he was awarded an honorary doctorate. His books include History of Acadia University Alumni and Nova Scotians and the Houses They Live In.

Linda Johns, Wild & Woolly: Tails from a Woodland Studio (McClelland & Stewart) $34.99 ISBN 0-7710-4412-7.

Artist and writer Linda Johns has become well known for nursing wounded animals and birds back to health, often adding the disabled to the lively family in her woodland studio. These tales of her furred and feathered companions - by turns touching, hilarious, affectionate, and inspiring - are sure to appeal to nature lovers everywhere.

Linda Johns is a full-time artist and writer living in rural Nova Scotia with an ever-shifting population of animals and a human male named Mack. Linda won the 1994 Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction for Sharing a Robin's Life and was shortlisted for the 2000 Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-Fiction for For the Birds: Nature Notes from a Woodland Studio. Her books also include The Eyes of the Elders and In the Company of Birds.

Alistair MacLeod, Island: The Collected Stories (McClelland & Stewart) $34.99 ISBN 0-7710-5568-4.

Alistair MacLeod was sixty-four years old when he published his first novel, No Great Mischief. Until it appeared in 1999, his published fiction consisted of a grand total of fourteen short stories, in two books - but the excellence of these stories earned him a worldwide reputation that made the appearance of his novel a major literary event. In addition to the classic seven stories from The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and the equally magnificent seven from As Birds Bring Forth the Sun, the last sixty pages or so of this book are devoted to two long stories, "Clearances" and "Island," which will be completely new to most readers.

Born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan in 1936 and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Alistair MacLeod lives in Windsor, Ontario and spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a clifftop cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island. In his early years, he financed his education as a logger, miner and fisherman. Until his retirement last spring, he was a professor of English at the University of Windsor.

Daniel N. Paul, We Were Not The Savages: A Mi'kmaq Perspective on the Collision between European and Native American Civilizations (Fernwood Publishing) $24.95 ISBN 1-55266-039-7.

This new, twenty-first century edition of We Were Not the Savages is a thoughtful rewrite and update of the original bestseller. We Were Not the Savages is a history of the Mi'kmaq, an ancient democratic Native North American Nation, from a Mi'kmaq perspective. It relates and details the genocidal efforts used by the British colonial officials, including scalp bounties, starvation and germ warfare, to subjugate them. The adversity that the Mi'kmaq People faced at times was so extreme that it seems almost impossible to comprehend how they overcame it. That they survived the best efforts of the colonizers to exterminate them, and then, from 1867 to the mid-twentieth century, a malnutrition existance under Canada's rule is a testament to their tenacious courage and faith in the Great Spirit.

Born on the Indian Brook Reserve in Nova Scotia, Daniel N. Paul is an ardent advocate of human rights. He worked for the Department of Indian Affairs as a District Superintendent of Lands, Revenues, Trusts, and Statutory Requirements and was the founding executive director of the Confederacy of Mainland Micmacs. The first edition of this book was the co-winner of the first prize for non-fiction at the 6th Annual City of Dartmouth Book and Writing Awards in 1994.
We Were Not the Saveges...is a unique, in chronological scope and in the story it tells, covering the last three centuries of Mi'kmaq history in detail. It is also extraordinary in the way it presents a distinctive voice [for] the Mi'kmaq...
Prior to the appearance of... this book it was common for historians to downplay or even deny the violence inflicted on the Mi'kmaq people by European and Euro-American colonizers. As recently as 1989 the conveners of a conference on 'The Northeastern Borderlands' summarized what they thought was an emerging consensus on the colonization process in the Maritimes: "widespread peaceful interaction or, to use Donald Meinig's phrase, 'benign articulation' existed among the various Native and European peoples in the region." This work, more than any other piece of scholarly production, has headed off that consensus at a pass. Scalp-bounty policies are now recognized as a historical problem worthy of investigation...
The book will be of particular interest to readers in the United States for a variety of reasons. First, the early history of colonization in the Maritimes is closely tied to the history of the colonies that became the United States, and as late as the 1750s New England's political leaders played a prominent role in directing the course of colonial affairs on Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia. Our understanding of New England is diminished, if we neglect its broader sphere of influence. We Were Not the Savages gives that history the attention it deserves. Second, the chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide a detailed and much needed basis of comparison for anyone seeking to understand the similarities and contrasts between the U.S. and Canada on questions of "Indian Affairs". And finally, it is important to recognize that we have far too few histories written by Native American authors - very few indeed that cover as extensive a time span as this book does.
      - Geoffrey Plank, Associate Professor of History, University of Cincinnati.

matt robinson, A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking (Insomniac Press) $12.95 ISBN 1-895837-86-3.

A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking is about memory -- memory as a poetic form through which refractions of loss, recovery, discovery and identity form an imaginative reshaping of the past. In raw brushstrokes, robinson records the slow cascade of events and characters slipping through the thin membrane of experience, shaping our histories. At the same time, he experiments with style and form in a wonderfully sinuous writing style.

A native of Halifax, matt robinson completed his Creative Writing/English MA at the University of New Brunswick and is now working towards a PhD. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including Canadian Literature, Event and Grain. He is on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and is the 2000 winner of the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize. This is his first book.