by Edward MacDonald
MacDonald writes that “home is a place in the heart. It is part actual and part invented, part remembered and part reconstructed, part learned and part inherited.” In The Geography of Home, MacDonald traces the rural Prince Edward Island that he grew up in from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, a landscape on the cusp of far-reaching change.
The depiction of an era offered here is a mixed-media portrait, combining prose and poetry, history and memory. Each poem takes as its touchstone a place, person, practice, or plot and is paired with a short reflection that unpacks facets of the culture being explored. MacDonald writes that while history attempts to trace changes over time, “memories are the little, coloured stones that we collect to assemble a mosaic of our lived past.”
September 1, 2025
Paperback 8.5 x 6, 140 pages, $24.95
ISBN 978-1-988692-78-4
BUY BOOK HERE
Edward MacDonald’s story-poems are as vernacular to the Island landscape as a centre-gable farmhouse, and as sturdy and as welcoming too. Collectively, they read like a patchwork quilt of land and sea, the weather and the seasons, people and places. Time passes but memories endure.
—Thomas O’Grady, author of What Really Matters, Delivering the News, and Coming Ashore: New and Selected Poems
Dr. Ed MacDonald is a professor emeritus from the University of Prince Edward Island. He is the author of If You’re Strong-hearted: Prince Edward Island in the Twentieth Century and co-author of The Summer Trade: A History of Tourism on Prince Edward Island and has written, compiled, or co-edited 9 other books. In 2023-24 he was appointed to the Order of Canada and then the Order of Prince Edward Island for his work as an Island historian and teacher.