‘Cowichan’ is the name of a lake, a river, a town in British Columbia that for a century has been famous for big timber. ‘The Cowichan’, David Day’s first book of poems was based on the early 1970’s journals he kept while working in logging camps around the Cowichan-Nitinat Lakes on Vancouver Island. Remote in his time, parts of this region remain sufficiently rural today to harbour Canada’s largest and tallest trees.

Cowichan and Nitinat are also the names of two ancient aboriginal civilizations. Many of Day’s poems have been influenced by native Indian myths, and several are directly derived from legends told to him by the Nitinat-Makah elders, Joe and Josh Edgar. Indeed, one of these tales recorded in his journals in the 70’s, some twenty years later inspired Day to write one of his most popular children’s stories: ‘The King of the Woods’. Published in 1993 as a children’s picture book, this tale has been published world-wide in many languages.

Day may have been the only logger-poet to name a book after this region, but Cowichan Lake has had more famous resident poets: the logger’s laureate Robert Swanson, for one; and that celebrated poet of the gold rush, Robert Service, for another.


Reviews:

“No other Canadian poet has presented the life of a logging camp with such authenticity and intensity: this is an important contribution to Canadian letters.” - Robin Skelton, ‘The Malahat Review’.

‘Day has an eye for a memorable situation and an ear for a memorable phrase…. It would be dishonest to say that he succeeds as well as Robert Frost does in his early monologues about a farming community in New England, but his poems do create a comparable impression….
All the poems in this book have at least one thing in common: they attack each of our senses with equal vitality and imagination.”
- Susan Musgrave, Victoria Times-Colonist.

‘These are simple poems, unpretentious, moving in the cadences of common speech. Their simplicity is one of distillation, and behind them is a sophisticated intelligence that makes connections and dictates order but never intrudes upon the reader.”
- Sean Virgo, Monday Magazine

“’The Cowichan’ is a strong, honest and well-made book. I’m glad to have read it. The directness of it, the poet has a terrific ear, and a manly humane quality.… It strikes me as being as good as anything of its kind that’s happened in this country. Bravo!”
- Dennis Lee

“An amazing depiction of life in the forests of British Columbia. I think trees have seldom been cut for a better purpose than to bring us these dazzling poems.” - Tom Wayman

‘This collection contains some of the finest logging poetry produced in British Columbia.” – Charles Lillard, The Written Woods.

“Here is a man who can do without the factitious. He has had experience and knows experience because of poetry. David Day writes as validly as he has lived.” – Ralph Gustafson