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Four Seasons of Canadian Life

by Yuiko Hammer

48 pages; Saddle stitched; illustrated; English/Japanese; catalogue #06-1299; ISBN 1-4120-9544-1; US$25.17, C$28.95, EUR20.68, £14.48

This beautifully illustrated book by Japanese poet and artist Yuiko Hammer records her new life in Canada and her love of the land and its people.

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About the Book

About the Author

Excerpts

Catalogue Information

About the Book

Yuiko Hammer, a multi-talented poet and artist, has presented an engaging reading experience in this collection of her dual-language English and Japanese poems illustrated by her own exquisite Oriental-brush paintings. Her poems cover the period when she first came to Canada from Japan to live in Port Alberni, British Columbia in the late 1970's to her current life in Victoria, British Columbia. She brings to her appreciation of Canadian life and nature a finely tuned Japanese aesthetic to create poetry that is fresh in its observations and paintings that are delicate in their shading and fine detail. The page layout is in itself a visual and cultural experience encompassing an English text, a Japanese text, and colored art.

The work is arranged in four sections, each signaling a season of the year. Her poetic and artistic journey begins in springtime when the first flowers recall to her mind her Japanese childhood when she played at flower-arranging, as described in "Spring Moments." This is typical of many of the poems in which the poet reconnects with herself and her old country by describing experiences in her new home. Accompanying this poem is a painting of three white snowdrops. Spring is also the time when Yuiko set off on a geographical journey by train across Canada, commemorated by a series of poems and paintings. Summer's bounty causes her to reflect on the sacred without confining herself to any one religion. In every season she relates directly to some aspect of nature, whether to crows waiting for the picnic to end in the autumn or the sentient life in trees at the end of winter when the first leaves and buds are about to come out. The joy of life manifest in these poems and paintings invites people of all ages to dip in and experience them.

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About the Author

Yuiko Hammer was born in 1939 in Chiba Prefecture, near Tokyo in Japan. Her father was a high school English teacher. When her family home was fire bombed in 1945, the remaining family moved to Ichinomiya, a small rural castle town in Chiba Prefecture. This is where Yuiko first learned to love nature, a love that was later reignited when she moved to Canada, as shown in her poems and paintings. Even in childhood Yuiko's Enikki, or illustrated diaries, always won the gold prize each year at school. Her family returned to Tokyo where she graduated from Hakuo High School. Because her widowed mother could not afford to send her to university, Yuiko went to work for an insurance company for the next six or seven years. During this time, her scientific interests let to her becoming an amateur radio operator. She was asked to be the interviewer of ham radio programs for a TV and a radio station. She held these positions for a few years. She met her first husband at the radio station. When she was 26, she enrolled in Tamagawa University and majored in Education. Through her long-time interest in ham radio, she met her second husband, a Canadian, and then moved to Canada and settled in Port Alberni, British Columbia. Now widowed, she lives in Victoria, British Columbia, where she has a small arts and crafts business.

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Excerpts

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