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Corona Radiata

Published 2000 by St. Thomas Press, Toronto

ISBN 0-9685339-3-0

About this book

Corona Radiata is a meditation how an embryo becomes a human being. The title comes from the web of cells that arrange themselves around the egg cell after it is released from the ovary.

The book’s nine sections describe a series of journeys within journeys. Voyages to map a new world. Travels through time. Searches in the maze. Pilgrimages to a known destination. Random wanderings. The great migration of species repeated by the individual.

Corona Radiata is a small, beautifully made book with a woodcut designed by Nancy Ruth Jackson for its front cover. In its small dimensions, it embraces a large world.

More about this book from the author.

Experience a poem

Music (from “Ear”) accompanied by Nora Bumanis

Homing (from “Head”) accompanied by Nora Bumanis

Text Poem – Maps

Reviews

[Major] charts the fetus’s journey towards light with both the delight and the precision with which explorers such as Cook responded to the New World. Like Hopkins’s poetry, Major’s reminds us vividly of the “Dearest freshness deep down things.”

-Letters in Canada, 2000

The conceit of gestation/parturition in Corona Radiata can be understood and usefully approached in three principal ways: an overall set of image clusters, as the poet does with her carefully chosen titles and arrangement of titles; the seeding and expansion (both quite apt to the conceit here) of a couple of general metaphors, notably those of art as making and word (logos) as message; and an often implicit echoing and reformatting of supportive biblical references.

Antigonish Review, No. 128 (“Three from St. Thomas”)

Buy a copy

Corona Radiata is out of print. You may download a free pdf of the original here.

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