A Summer Father
When her father Major John Jarmain died in the Battle of Normandy on June 26, 1944, Joanna Weston was six years old. A book of Jarmain’s poetry was published in 1945 and Joanna read the poems again and again over the years in an attempt to get to know the man behind the words. Her own book of poems, A Summer Father, gives us a poignant portrait of her absent father and her own war-marred childhood.
Reviews
“poignant and spare in all the good ways” ~ Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Today’s war in Afghanistan with Canadian Soldiers fighting on he front lines (and sometimes dying in action) gives this book a special relevancy and a poignancy that it wouldn’t have had even five years ago.
Any Canadian soldier currently in Afghanistan will be fortunate indeed if 50 or 60 years from now a poetic descendant remembers that soldier as eloquently as Joanna M. Weston has remembered her own “summer father”. ~ Rob MacLeod, Canadian Bookseller
Impressively moving poems. ~ Alex Rettie, Alberta Views
