by Judy Gaudet
In her third poetry collection, Judy Gaudet “brings us heart-deep and eye-level with Prince Edward Island’s fields, woods, and shores,” says Deirdre Kessler, former PEI Poet Laureate.
Another Landscape addresses the ordinary wonders of a life shared with her partner and their dog, where “Nothing is needed. Everything is here between us.” Though the poems grow out of this one life on the Island, Gaudet takes the long view of time. She sees at once the molecules of the red sandstone cliffs and her own, that have held together for greatly different timespans. The poems gather small but notable moments of Island life and insist we look closer, for “this is life, as long as we have it.”
Readers will recognize the “fishing boats and their bright primaries” and “that open spot where the water is moving fast enough not to freeze up.” Gaudet’s poems, writes Richard Lemm, professor emeritus in English, speak to the human capacity to be renewed and deeply transfigured by observant intimacy with nature. And they return again and again to gratitude: “What luck to spend a lifetime / seeing what things are” and to her uplifting faith that there is “good luck and gold / flying up everywhere.”
March 20, 2026
6 x 9, Paperback, 58 pages, $18.95
ISBN 978-1-988692-82-1
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Judy Gaudet’s Another Landscape brings us heart-deep and eye-level with Prince Edward Island’s fields, woods, and shores. Gaudet’s painterly eye and close observations of garden and landscape bring us into the present moment, surprising us with the joys and sorrows of lives lived with reverence and by paying close attention. Nestlings sing from a hollow in an old linden tree by an old house.
—Deirdre Kessler, 6th Poet Laureate of Prince Edward Island
Judy Gaudet’s third poetry collection speaks to the human capacity to be renewed and deeply transfigured by observant intimacy with nature. Her reflections move from the cosmic, “our galaxy / sweeping across the dark,” to the microcosmic, observing that we and all else are “fellow molecules / held loosely together.” In between are a snowstorm’s “whirling robe of white fire” and “the constancy of bad news, the insistent / tide of failures.” Yet her poems return again and again to gratitude: “What luck to spend a lifetime / seeing what things are” and to her uplifting faith that there is “good luck and gold / flying up everywhere.”
—Richard Lemm, author of Jeopardy and Imagined Truths
Judy Gaudet is a Prince Edward Island poet and painter whose books include Conversation with Crows (Oberon, 2014) and Her Teeth Are Stones (Acorn, 2005). She is the editor of 150+: Canada’s History in Poetry (Acorn, 2018).