Wayside Gleams

Wayside Gleams gathers poems that pulse with the heart of two lands. Laura Goodman Salverson, daughter of Icelandic immigrants to Canada, writes verses that ache and glow in equal measure: love letters to the frozen prairie and the volcanic North, to the grandparents who crossed oceans and the children who inherited their longing. These are poems where memory lives in specific detail (the smell of new lumber, the weight of a hand on a child's shoulder) rather than sentiment. Salverson's voice is direct and unsentimental even when the subject is grief or belonging, which makes the moments of tenderness hit harder. The collection includes tributes to both homelands ('For Canada,' 'Iceland,' 'Childhood's Friend') and the spaces between them, where immigrants and their descendants learn to carry two addresses in one chest. For readers who crave poetry that earns its emotion through precision rather than exclamation.