In university, I took a fourth-year course on the Romantic Period in English literature. I love the prose and poems of that period; Blake is my favourite, where my professor at the time was pretty much obsessed with Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” 

Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) is a professor Romantic literature who teaches at St. Francis Xavier University. Sadly, she now reports that she hasn’t taught literature of that period for several years. I guess there’s not enough demand for it, which baffles me. That hasn’t stopped Stewart from bringing the words and mood of the Romantic writers to life in her book of lyric essays, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield Press, 2018).

In Tides of Time, Stewart goes through the year, month by month, looking at the labour of the people who produce the food we eat—real food, food from the earth, not from a factory. Starting in September (which is why I’m posting this on the first day of fall), she gets on her bike (or sometimes in her car) and cycles out to interview fishers, farmers, bakers, beekeepers, and cheesemakers, to name a few, around her home community of Antigonish about the work they do and why they love doing it. 

In keeping with the form of the lyric essay, she regularly quotes from writers of the Romantic Period, such as John Keats and William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau, and she occasionally throws in something from Aristotle or the Bible. But what’s most impressive about her writing is the vivid word pictures she paints of places and people and feelings. Here’s how she opens the chapter she calls Spring’s Overture:

Dawn comes suddenly now, with a beautiful blush. On March 1, the sky fills with muted amber and soft pink, as if wine had been poured into the air, tinging it with sweet fruitfulness. A burst of darker purple-pink appears like a cherry tree in blossom. Then the sky turns orange as the softest pink dissolves, which lightens to yellow as it spreads, like liquid from a lemon squeezed. 

A few thin grey clouds smudge the light. 

Feeling tired and distracted by the length of winter, I haven’t noticed beauty or looked this hard, for days, but this morning is different. Colour pours and blends and moves with the light. I’d like to slip into its heat. 

Now the colour is gone. Morning evolves. The day becomes dull: the sky plain and covered in clouds. 

In March, light stretches and retreats, still finding its comfort in the whiteness of winter. The days are longer but they haven’t lengthened all the way to spring. March’s fingers are still curled in the cold, unable to unfold, to reach that far.

But March is a month of music, probably more than of light. 

As I lie in bed, waiting for the first cracks of morning, I hear the birds. At this early hour, they sing more fully now. In spring, song precedes the light: invites it.

“The air is a velvet cushion against which I press my ear,” Henry David Thoreau said, as he listened for the sounds of the first robins and bluebirds and insects. 

“May my melody not be wanting to the season,” he added … “I go forth to make new demands on life.”

This month, Stewart will visit a sheep farm. She will go there in lambing season, when the ewes are birthing and then feeding their new babies. 

This is a beautiful book, evocatively, poetically, romantically written. It was also the second-place winner of the 2018 Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction. 

If you’re ever feeling down and you need something beautiful to lift you up, try this book. 

Other books with a lyrical quality:

Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, by Laura Pratt

I Don’t Do Disability: And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, by Adelle Purdham

Other books about real food:

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest, by Helena Moncrieff

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, by Bonnie Reichert

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie