Burden of Snow, The

What makes us who we are? Genealogy? Geography? Experience?In this collection of poems, Heather MacLeod maps out the intertwining threads of one woman's history, following bloodlines, trap lines and ancestral migrations from Ireland, Scotland, and Russia to the British Columbia interior and back again. What she discovers is that the mystery of one's own composition is as puzzling and far-reaching as the mystery of life itself. In the process she draws upon everything from the all-but-lost language of an Arctic people, to the shores of Greece, to modern pop culture. Traveling around the world with stops in Turkey, the United States, and myriad other places, MacLeod's narrator finally decides that who we are is defined by how we carry the burden of life, and how we share it with others. For, like the snow that permeates her history, her thoughts, and her poetry, MacLeod reveals that life and love at first appear weightless, and then collect on our limbs and bear down; challenging us to stand up straight, to absorb the weight of our past, accept our present, look towards the future, and carry on.