Endlings

by Joanna Lilley

Overview

Joanna emigrated to Canada from the UK and continues to maintain a number of connections there; there has been interest for festivals there to have her over in the new year to promote Endlings.

She has already been invited to the South Downs Poetry Festival (UK), summer 2020, Wild Words North, northern BC, September 2020, and The Bakehouse, Scotland (2020 if timing works out)

"Specimen" was the winning entry for the 2019 Planet in Peril Poetry Competition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780888016904
Publisher:	Turnstone Press
Publication date:	04/10/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	798 KB

About the Author

Joanna Lilley is an award-winning poet living in Whitehorse. Born in the UK, Joanna has always been drawn north, crossing the Arctic Circle twice, before settling in the Yukon. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Malahat Review and Grain. Endlings is her third collection of poetry.

THE FLEECE ERA was nominated for the Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry (2015) and WORRY STONES (then The Gallachists) longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award (2016) and the Fish Young Adult Novel Prize. "Specimen" was the winning entry for Planet in Peril Poetry Competition (2019) and she was a finalist for The Malahat Review Open Season Awards, poetry (2018)

Joanna is a true adventurer: she has cycled across Canada alone from Nova Scotia to Inuvik in the NWT, nearly 10,000 km, in 1991. She also worked her passage across the Atlantic Ocean, hitching on yachts from Gibraltar to the West Indies via Morocco and Madeira, 1985. Joanna stopped eating animals on her thirteenth birthday and still regrets not stopping earlier.

She currently works as an Online Communications Manager for the Government of Yukon in Whitehorse. Joanna has given writing workshops and talks in places as far afield as Iceland and Alaska and is active in Yukon's writing scene.
Joanna Lilley is an award-winning poet living in Whitehorse. Born in the UK yet always drawn north, Joanna settled in the Yukon 14 years ago where she lives in a log home beside the boreal forest. Endlings is her fifth book and third collection of poetry.

Read an Excerpt

Specimen

There will come a time
when there are only two humans
left in the world and they will be dead.
You, perhaps, and me.
We will have been shot and carefully
cleaned. We will be skinned.
All our creases and tears
emptied of viscera.
Our surfaces salted, sulphured,
potassium carbonated.
We will be mounted, glassed
in separate collections as far apart
as London and Lincolnshire.
No one will remember to write down
where we came from.
One of us will be misplaced.
There will be only one human skin
left in the world and it will be yours.
Many won’t believe you are a unique species.
They will think you are a juvenile
of an existing genus.
Or a deviation.
You will be taken to the World Museum
in Liverpool. You won’t have been
to Liverpool before.
You will never leave.
Your legs, removed for stuffing,
will be put back on
the wrong way round.
Someone will paint your glass eyes red
because they heard
that was the colour your eyes once were.
After two hundred years
there will be tests.
Three short DNA sequences
on the mitochondrial 12S gene
will prove you are a distinct species,
a specimen, moreover,
of the legendary Homo sapiens
from the Plastitronic age,
alleged architect of annihilation.

—Spotted green pigeon

Table of Contents

Beauty 3

Speaking for themselves

We Are Weather 7

The Flightless Bird of Mauritius 8

If Rain Touched Me 10

For a Time a Constellation 12

Hunger 13

Goddess of the Yangtze 14

Water Diviner 16

Lepidopterology as a Method of Foretelling 18

Episodes of extinction

Accident 23

The Last Labrador Duck 24

The Last Heath Hen 26

Poplars, Sycamores and Oaks 28

The Foolish Dog of the South 30

The Whales of Herschel Island 32

Great Northern Expedition 34

Penguin of the North 36

On Eldey Island 38

Big Island 41

Takapourewa Wren 42

Great Claw 44

The River Breached 46

War Stories 48

In Bialowieza Forest 50

Seven 52

Day and Night 54

Recorded for Posterity

Official Announcement 57

Black 58

Nothing Can Be Done 60

When the Brigalows Burn 61

The Great Plains 62

Crossing 63

Spelunking 64

Desert Fish 65

Rewind 66

Grandmother's Porch 68

Who on Earth 69

The Last Age 70

They Bring It On Themselves 72

Rainforest 73

Thawings 74

Necrofauna 76

White 78

The Last Song of the Kaua' i 'o 'o 79

Encounters with Paleontology

Collection 83

Omaciw 84

Death Pose 85

Herbivore 86

Leaning 87

Mother 88

Under and In Front 90

Letting 92

Diverted 94

Osteology 96

Sketches in Fossil 98

Dendrochronology 100

At the Laboratory 102

Impression 103

Transmutation 104

Skeleton City 106

Pangaea 108

How Carefully We Preserve the Dead 109

Specimen 110

Newfoundland 112

I saw you

I Hold Up My Hands 117

Gondwana 118

Northwest Passage 120

Yesterday's Camel 122

At the Wildlife Preserve 124

Garden Lion 125

Off Course 126

Furbearer 127

Cornish Giants 128

Confession 129

A Record of Today Might Be 130

Flight Log 132

Witness 133

It's Time to Talk of Hope 134

It Won't Hurt 137

Endnotes 138

Index to Poems by Species 142

Sources and Resources 145

Acknowledgements 151

Reading Group Guide

Beauty

There’s a rumour about beauty,
its long whiskers and golden eyes,
its stripes as dark
as the moon shadows of trees.
There’s a rumour that the forest
took the beauty,
that the people who took
the forest took the beauty.
The beauty’s stripes tightened,
sliced right through—the people
said they had nothing to do with it.
The whiskers caught fire
and the golden eyes burned
right through.

—Javan tiger

Editorial Reviews

We are so disconnected from nature we think it’s the economy that makes our lifestyles and lives possible. In fact it’s the complex web of nature within which we are inextricably linked and on which we are utterly dependent.
When a species disappears, that complex web of life loses resilience and productivity. Endlings is a reminder of what we have lost within human memory. It’s a frightening reminder that Nature is our Mother and source of life.
—David Suzuki

From the Publisher