Lunar Tides Mood Board
Today, we’re bringing back our mood board series with a feature on Shannon Webb-Campbell’s stunning poetry collection Lunar Tides. The following poster—comprised of family photos, Maritime scenes, waves, and moons—captures some of this collection’s dusky atmosphere. It gestures to Webb-Campbell’s fascination with the way grieving a loved one can be at once destabilizing, a pandoras box of emotional longing, but also grounding, a recollection of deep, firm, and poetic attachments our own roots.
Originating from Webb-Campbell’s deep grief of losing her mother, Lunar Tides charts the arc to finding her again in the waves. The poetics follow rhythms of the body, the tides, the moon, and long, deep familial relationships that are both personal and ancestral. Written from a mixed Mi’kmaq/settler perspective, this work also explores the legacies of colonialism, kinship and Indigenous resurgence.
“In Lunar Tides, Shannon Webb-Campbell exposes a heart that’s broken but also carried across the gulf between the moon and the sea, a heart that knows how “grief takes up with the body.” She shows us that grief is tidal, its ebb and flow pulsing like the moon and dog-earring our memories. This book reminds us that, grieving or not, we “need to be held by something other than a theory,” writes Douglas Walbourne-Gough, author of Crow Gulch.
Shannon Webb-Campbell is a mixed Indigenous (Mi’kmaq) settler poet, writer, and critic. She is the author of Still No Word (2015), recipient of Eagle Canada’s Out in Print Award, and I Am A Body of Land (2019; finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry). Shannon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and a MA in English Literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, and is pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of New Brunswick in the Department of English. She is the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine. Shannon is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation and lives in Kijpuktuk/Halifax in Mi’kma’ki.
