Labyrinth of Green is a new collection of poetry and photography by Diana Hayes. Her poems and photographs share maps and narratives for the inner journey, a labyrinth that leads to wholeness, to our own centre and back again out into the world. Here, both beauty and the forces of nature are revealed in delight, in grief and ultimately through awakening. Each of the book’s five sections explores aspects of this process. The reader enters a West Coast rainforest and walks toward the inner sanctum of the wetlands. Childhood and adolescence and the lessons of the underworld will be encountered. Ancestors provide solace and wisdom. The well of grief is visited. Dreamscapes of near-sleep, offering healing — as witness, as seer, as sage — conclude the final section, “where sleep’s wild embrace does not prepare you.” About the Author: Diana Hayes was born in 1955 in Toronto and has lived on both coasts of Canada. She studied at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria, receiving a BA and an MFA in Creative Writing. She has six published books, her most recent being This is the Moon’s Work: New and Selected Poems. Her narrative photography has been featured in galleries in coastal BC and commissioned for book covers. Her practice of year-round ocean swimming inspired the formation of the Salt Spring Seals in 2002. She lives on Salt Spring Island, home since 1981, with her husband Peter, ginger cat, and myriad water birds and raptors on five forested acres near Little Stevens Lake. |