Wedding in Fire Country - by Darren Bifford (Paperback)

About the Book

A beautiful girl once confessed she killed a crow.
They mate for life, she said. Now one follows
me wherever I go.

Book Synopsis

An otherworldly uncanniness haunts the margins of Darren Bifford's debut collection, Wedding in Fire Country. Bifford is exceptionally adept at capturing the beauty of the mundane, and his poetry offers an insightful meditation on the meaning of the individual journey within larger political and geographical spheres. However, these familiar scenes are shot through with darker moments of raw violence and fear, as wolves wander the landscape of young adulthood and disaster taps at the windows of domestic spaces.

Bifford makes use of folkloric motifs and the juxtaposition of wilderness and urban environments to emphasize radical gaps in human understanding. Throughout the collection, the unknowable is embodied not in monstrous creatures, but in common experiences such as nostalgia, illness and accidents. Many of the poems are related in a voice whose serenity belies its sinister undertones--in one poem, the narrator's tone hardly registers a change when a father-son bonding experience suddenly takes a gruesome turn. Touching moments of intimacy can be found throughout this collection, but menace continues to lurk in the shadows.

Review Quotes

Reading this collection, I feel communicated with, and indeed, carrying it around for several weeks to dip into during my spare moments, I came to feel companionate towards it, as though the poems' frequent depictions of people enjoying each other's company had bled into my consciousness, tingeing my worldview with its sociability. I suspect that Wedding in Fire Country will have a similar effect on anyone who spends some real time with it, and I heartily recommend doing so.
-Stewart Cole, The Urge: Reviewing New Canadian Poetry

Nightmare leaves you with a chill down your back with the last quote they are my friends my son. And they are coming. Bifford asks the question: is this the beginning of the nightmare or the end? These poems do not come together like one big story, but rather like stories told around a campfire; some happy, some scary, all intriguing.
-Thomas Stubbs, Salty Ink