Poemario de Spanish Bank

About the Book

Poemario de Spanish Bank is a collection of poems composed in Spanish and translated in English by the author. It is preceded by a prologue connecting the title with the geographic and historical site.

Not all the poems are directly inspired by the sandy bank gradually emerging as the tide recedes, but almost all of them cropped up in the author’s mind as she was wandering toward the inconstant limits of rising and falling tides. All the poems intend to capture the intensity of some moments of daily life, in wakefulness and sleep, be it on ecological, psychological or social matters.

In several poems the subject is the personal pronoun we expressing empathy with the plight of people in so many parts of the world, concern for the deterioration and loss of natural habitats, for the negative impact of large-scale enterprises on nature, people and animals species. In other poems we denotes as well, responsibility and hope for the state of planet earth.

The author recalls oneiric images reflecting the above feelings and transmitting at the same time an inner vision conjured up by cerebral activity during sleep. Such inner vision is the source of the poetic images lending an aura of mystery to the poems whether they are gathered under the headings of Nature Under Siege or Ghostly Loves, or Encounters, Disappearances… or Ubiquitous Silica, or Memory's Meanders, the five sections comprising the book.

About the Author

M. G. Tomsich was born in Fiume, Italy (until 1945)and emigrated to Canada in 1951. A year in Manitoba was mainly spent working as a nurse's aide in the Ninette TB Sanatorium, near Brandon. Ocean and Rocky Mountains attracted her to Vancouver and kept ever vivid the memory of another infinitely smaller body of water, the Adriatic, and another less majestic mountain range, the Julian Alps.

Soon she found a job as laboratory assistant at a branch of Connaught Labs. at UBC (University of British Columbia) where she worked for seven years. Time taken by courses in bacteriology and other disciplines were made up on weekends according to need. Correspondence courses helped to accumulate requisites toward the B.A..

Transition to literature led her to an M.A with a thesis on the poetry and theory of Carlos Bousoño. A couple of years later, an assistantship allowed her to pursue her PhD at Brown University. Thanks to a generous Canada Council scholarship she was able to research in Spanish archives and libraries essential material for her doctoral thesis on Jansenism in Spain.

Her academic publications are all in Spanish and deal mainly with eighteenth-century topics, some related to the history of medicine in Spain.

Teaching and family absorbed most of her time. Poetry is one of her constant activities. In her Poemario de Spanish Bank, translated in English by herself, she draws her poetic images from dreams, from her other life-long endeavour, ceramics, and from the more recent silver-smithing.