Driving Home
Shaun Cunningham
2023 | 5.5 x 8.5 inches | 36 pages
ISBN: 978-1-7388173-4-4
With a curious and observant eye, the poems in Driving Home traverse the various landscapes – physical and emotional – of the poet’s life. From the Canadian prairies to Ireland, Japan, and the Maritimes, Shaun Cunningham navigates the territories of memory, family stories, and the practice of paying attention, all with an explorer’s gift for locating the unexpected moments that change everything. Observing that “Neither way is forward on a bridge”, these poems move freely between recollection and insight, story and epiphany, and leave us with the conviction that however difficult the journey, “the complications / aren’t in the road itself.”
from “The Right Approach to Gardening”:
[…]
This has been my approach to gardening
ever since. Every year, I have thistles and nettles
and vines, with a few tomatoes that manage to survive
all the interesting things that try to throttle them,
a handful of golden cherries among the weeds.
Shaun Cunningham is the first Canadian-born child of an immigrant Irish family. He grew up on the prairies where his parents teased him about his Canadian accent and his classmates about his Irish one. A life-long writer, he recently retired from teaching middle school. His piece “Werewolf”, which recounts the importance of stories in his childhood home, recently won the WFNB prize for Nonfiction. He lives in Sackville with his wife Jen and their mutt Lily.