The Grey Islands

By John Steffler

Deluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada’s former Parliamentary Poet Laureate.Includes new material.

On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.

The Grey Islands is the story of one man’s pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. Using a broad range of styles, The Grey Islands delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771313728

John Steffler

John Steffler other books of poetry include Lookout, a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; That Night We Were Ravenous, winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize; and Helix: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Poetry Prize. Steffler is also the author of the award-winning novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright. Brick Books issued a new edition of The Grey Islands in 2000 and is now presenting a newer edition in 2015 as the Brick Books Classics 2.

Book preview

"I am placing it among other masterpieces of environmental writing like Thoreau’s Walden, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild . . . an iconic book that sets dramatically before us, in a way that is richly complex, at once meditative and expansive, the difficult and essential encounter of wilderness."

— DON MCKAY, for What is Stephen Harper Reading?

"This is a book of such excellence that someone in the future is liable to say about the author: ‘Steffler — Steffler? — oh yes, he wrote The Grey Islands, didn’t he?’"

— AL PURDY, Books in Canada (1985)

At times the narrative was harrowing, as we were given glimpses of the unmitigating ferocity of land and sea, and of past lives and inhabitants wiped out — their black skeleton houses left as solitary reminders. At other times, we were offered humour, absurdity and a light-hearted vision of endurance and strength, of body and spirit.

— HEATHER CRAIG, Books in Canada (2008)

It is important to have stories like these, full of anecdote and detail, messages and dreams, written into the national literature. . . . John Steffler’s nascent classic of wilderness literature claims certain space in the Canadian canon.

— KEMENY BABINEAU, Poetry Spoken Here

THE GREY ISLANDS

BOOKS BY JOHN STEFFLER

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POETRY & PROSE

An Explanation of Yellow · 1981

• The Grey Islands · 1985

The Wreckage of Play · 1988

The Afterlife of George Cartwright · 1993

That Night We Were Ravenous · 1998

Helix: New and Selected Poems · 2002

Lookout · 2010

FOR CHILDREN

Flights and Magic · 1987

John Steffler

The Grey Islands

with a new afterword by the author

and a new introduction by

Adrian Fowler

BRICK BOOKS

Copyright © John Steffler, 1985, 2000, 2015

Brick Books Classics first edition, 2015

ISBN 978-1-77131-373-8

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

BRICK BOOKS

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Steffler, John, 1947– , author

The Grey Islands / John Steffler ; with a new afterword by the author and a new introduction by Adrian Fowler.. – Brick Books classics first edition, 2015.

(Brick Books classics ; 2)

Poems.

First published: Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, c1985.

ISBN 978-1-77131-372-8 (epub)

I. Fowler, Adrian, writer of supplementary textual content II. Title. III. Series: Brick Books classics ; 2

PS8587.T346G73 2015          C811’.54          C2014-905753-9

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: John Steffler’s The Grey Islands

by Adrian Fowler

Introduction to the first Brick Books edition,

by Don Coles

THE GREY ISLANDS

One

Two

Three

Four

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD:

The Grey Islands through Binoculars

A Note on the Text

Biographical Note

INTRODUCTION: JOHN STEFFLER’S THE GREY ISLANDS

¶ In June 1983, my wife and I sailed from Newfoundland to Labrador on the coastal steamer Sir Robert Bond. We were on a mission to transport a car to two friends who were living in Happy Valley / Goose Bay. We drove about four hours to the town of Lewisporte in Notre Dame Bay and departed on board the Bond at two in the afternoon. A few hours later, through binoculars, I spied the Horse Islands off the port bow, and a huge iceberg three to five miles distant. But gradually fog smothered the vessel, and so I missed seeing the Grey Islands, thirty miles to the north. It was a disappointment because I had a draft of John Steffler’s new work in my bag. The next day, while we made our way up the Labrador coast, entered Hamilton Inlet, and steamed down Lake Melville, I read John’s typescript, and the more I read the more my first impressions were confirmed: he had created an extraordinary document about a journey to a place. And I knew that place was only in the most literal sense the Grey Islands.

The Grey Islands: A Journey was published by McClelland and Stewart in 1985. The reviews were positive, some of them glowing. One critic declared the work a piece of genius and urged readers to look out for Steffler in the future; another claimed that the writer had created "a montage as rich in voice and form as Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; a third praised both the physical nature of the writing and the author’s marvelous and rare talent of understatement. The few complaints seemed forced, dredged up out of a perceived need to find something to criticize. Some of them were accompanied by elementary misreadings of the text and a cheerful disregard for the geography of Newfoundland. The form of the work stymied others. The mixture of poetry and prose – census data, ghost stories, faux philosophical musings, tall tales, lyrics of natural description, yarns, journal entries, dramatic monologues, sexual and other fantasies – just the horror and the hilarity besetting the poor benighted town planner from Toronto – all of this, even when admired, puzzled some readers. It did not appear to be your typical collection of poems. What was it? A curious book," one critic concluded. Reviewers are usually well intentioned, often overworked and typically underpaid, but it is sobering to contemplate the perils that face a work of originality and depth when it is launched into the world.

Nevertheless, over the years The Grey Islands attracted fresh readers, largely by word of mouth. A new edition brought out by Brick Books in 2000 was greeted enthusiastically, necessitating two further print runs. In 2007, Rattling Books published an audio version of the work, performed by John Steffler, Frank Holden, Janis Spence, Deidre Gillard-Rollings and Darryl Hopkins. It too was well received.

More recently, the work has inspired two thoughtful contemporary responses. The first is an elaborate project by the ceramic artist, Michael Flaherty, who spent three months on the Grey Islands in the summer of 2009. There he constructed an inside-out kiln and conceptually fired the entire south island. He also shot photographs and videos of the landscape and wildlife, and collected pottery shards and caribou antlers. Based on these artifacts, he created ceramic works that evoke a connection to the natural environment of the Grey Islands and its abandoned human settlement. In 2010, the project evolved into an interactive exhibition piece, Settlers of Grey Islands, a custom version of the popular board game, Settlers of Catan, and later culminated in a solo exhibition, The Grey Islands, at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown in the fall of 2012. Although this multilayered interdisciplinary work constitutes an independent art project, Flaherty was moved to undertake it after reading Steffler’s amazingly beautiful book.

The second is Adam Beardsworth’s essay, "Natural’s Not in It: Postcolonial Wilderness in Steffler’s The Grey Islands," published in Newfoundland and Labrador Studies in 2010. This is a fullon discussion of Steffler’s work in the language of postmodern critical theory, a language I can read but do not speak. Or, to put it another way, it is not a language I have learned to dream in. Nevertheless, Beardsworth’s analysis is skillful and serious, and, in some significant ways, perceptive and persuasive. Like Michael Flaherty’s art project, it responds to John Steffler’s work by translating it to another conceptual plane, challenging categories and assumptions concerning how the world of The Grey Islands might be construed.

The Grey Islands has usually been understood as a modern rendering of an old story – the quest of the individual who retreats from civilization to find a more authentic self in nature. This view was most articulately expressed on the back-cover blurb of the millennial edition, which categorized the book as a classic of wilderness writing, setting it alongside the works of Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Annie Dillard. Since the narrator’s encounter with an extreme and unforgiving natural environment is powerfully expressed in the text, such an interpretation would almost seem obvious. But it is more complicated than that. Lorna Crozier, writing in the Journal of Canadian Poetry, was almost alone among the early commentators in understanding that The Grey Islands is not just about place but about people. Flaherty and Beardsworth, in their