Brenda Schmidt

Schmidt’s poetry is the Canadian wilderness. From the tundra to the prairies, it reads like a naturalist’s tour of the Canadian north. In language both deft and pure, Schmidt creates the relationships between external and internal landscapes, examining the impacts left by the travellers who seek the wealth of the north’s resources. More Than Three Feet Of Ice measures the non-renewable against the renewable, and the past against the present, in one of the last frontiers on earth. Praised by such contemporaries as Lorna Crozier, Brenda Schmidt has emerged as a distinctive voice, necessary and appropriate for the conscience of our time.

“Every once in a while a poet comes along whom you suddenly know you’ve been waiting for. Clear-eyed, original, imaginative. Brenda Schmidt is such a poet. She makes a familiar landscape unfamiliar in a most disarming way.” — Lorna Crozier

These elegant lyrical poems are inspired by the fictional character of Flin Flon in J.E. Preston Muddock's 1905 novel The Sunless City, and the beautiful environs of the town bearing his name.
Language becomes a canvas upon which nature and a nameless human longing are entwined in a haunting wordscape of memory, love and desire.