Rush of Wingspan (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026)
Outwards from a northern wilderness childhood these poems thrum musically with intuitive environmentalism in urban, coastal, and boreal forests.
He’s an organist / and she’s a northern // nurse: she mends / the broken / bones of gold // miners / when their sky / falls in.
Eleonore Schönmaier explores three great forests of her life through the lens of experiential environmentalism. Along woodland trails and on the shores of essential bodies of water, she reveals beauty and loss in equal measure in these poems.
Wildlife appears at regular intervals, never when expected. In Schönmaier’s boreal forest childhood, she witnesses human and environmental exploitation and lives a life of labour. In a moment of joy, a canoe transforms into a sled. As she moves into adulthood, music creates a pulse to her life and her poems. In a heatwave, two pianists perform Wasserklavier in a botanical garden. A singer works in the Dutch resistance. A Greek composer creates love songs. An organist rides the rear carrier of a bicycle. Turkish composer Fazıl Say performs his Black Earth.
Goldfinches, blue-winged teals, waterthrushes, blue herons, and flickers inhabit the pages of Rush of Wingspan. The soundscape of these poems is intimate in scale – about nature, art, animals, cycling – chamber music more than opera. Love is the blue-river thread in the warp and weft of the collection. Schönmaier’s focus on planetary and human rights is the red-blood contrast.
Reviews
“With a purity that stuns, these poems unfurl a consciousness that is exquisitely alert – to sensory and interior worlds, to the textures of human love and its deprivations. Each poem its own concentrated morsel, each poem leaving you needing the next.” Julie Sedivy, author of Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love
“Eleonore Schönmaier’s Rush of Wingspan is a sanctuary of stillness, offering a space for clarity and reflection. Her prismatic poems navigate silence, perception, and memory with a painterly delicacy, encouraging the reader to forge a deeper connection with oneself and the natural world.” J. Mae Barizo, author of Tender Machines
“The rush of a life fully lived, swift and ephemeral. A span from tenderness to brutality, activity to contemplation, nature to art. Though tethered to the witnessed world, Schönmaier’s visionary attention holds these poems aloft.” Stephanie Bolster, author of Long Exposure
“‘If we want / clarity,’ writes Eleonore Schönmaier, ‘we should try casting / a bronze sculpture’ – but ‘her new book suggests another source of rare clarity: reading poetry like hers. In blending spareness and amplitude, memories and immediacy, these poems are among her most riveting ever.” Brian Bartlett, author of The Astonishing Room
“Rush of Wingspan is a stunning collection that distills and details youth’s harsh realities, love’s adult healing, and the natural world enfolding them. Eleonore Schönmaier shows life in all its depths and beauty where ‘light in its fullness / both fades and brightens,’ illuminated by her poetic brilliance.” Kevin Irie, author of The Tantramar Re-Vision
Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021)
Island life carries on while a beautiful woman lies in a coma surrounded by friends and lovers.
Thyme clings, high / and away from the grazing and scents / the air.
Island reality is interconnected with live-retrieved memories in which a nurse follows a violent patient into the northern Canadian bush, a migrant mother faces her new job as the village butcher, an Ojibway man is forced to walk a dangerous route home alone, teenagers loot the local dump to build their mother’s wheelchair, and an electrician watches a woman play a grand piano on a ballfield.
A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. By centring her experiential empathy on a history of racism and poverty, she guides us into better ways of being. Intimate reflections are contrasted with geopolitical and environmental concerns as Schönmaier’s fierce intelligence focuses on what is most essential in our lives.
The arc of this collection offers a rejuvenating meditation on the meaning of loss and love, highlighted by the lyric beauty of the writing.
“These are understated poems grounded in imagism, snapshots of a life, where the poet speaks quietly to her reader with precision and insight.” Armand Garnet Ruffo, author of Treaty#
“Spanning continents and decades, the poems in Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete bear witness to beauty, pain, and injustice alike. Meditative and musical, Schönmaier’s verse renders the world in vivid, attentive language.” Annick MacAskill, author of Murmurations
“Eleonore Schönmaier’s poems are profoundly lyrical. Their words come from a brave and tender witness, and in their white spaces is the sound of an orchestra playing by the sea.” Sadiqa de Meijer, author of The Outer Wards
Wellenlängen deines Liedes (parasitenpresse, 2020).
Wavelengths of Your Song in German translation.
“Wellenlängen deines Liedes ist ein großartiges Buch einer ebensolchen Autorin, die es kennenzulernen gilt.” —Matthias Ehlers Westdeutscher Rundfunk
Dust Blown Side of the Journey (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017)
Global migrations and music create a symphonic journey where nature ignites wildfires and love fully lived.
Eleonore Schönmaier’s [third] poetry collection, Dust Blown Side of the Journey, is the work of a poet who has mastered her craft…featuring a beautifully elaborate intertwining of images…connections continue from poem to poem…akin to recurring melodies or riffs across distinct movements of a composition…poems both captivating and moving. —Emma Skagan The Malahat Review, Autumn 2018
Schönmaier is a perfect mix of Nelson Ball’s wonder and brevity along with the breadth and wisdom, experience and vision of a Lorna Crozier or a Sharon Olds. That is some fine company and Schönmaier is right at home…monstrously good…Reading Dust Blown Side of the Journey is like that first long cool and quenching gulp of fresh spring water after a long hike. —Michael Dennis Today’s Book of Poetry, 2018
Eleonore Schönmaier’s Dust Blown Side of the Journey…takes an ecological approach with its rich selection of nature poetry, but her collection is also intimate and self-reflective…Capturing moments of human greed and human kindness, of striving for community, and of unapologetic joy, Schönmaier’s work is rejuvenating, and offers both a sense of peace and a time for introspection.” —Monica Sousa Canadian Literature, Autumn 2018
Wavelengths of Your Song (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013)
Eleonore Schönmaier takes the reader on a journey along the wavelengths of the ocean, sound, and the physics of light.
The poems feel impelled by a passionate, unblinking curiosity about the world and its creatures…The fluidity within the poems is matched by the subtle flow between them…The effect is like that of a symphony with interwoven and subtly varied musical statements, and, as in a symphony, the effect is cumulative…This collection could be enjoyed for the beauty of the language alone. —Jean Van Loon, Arc Poetry Magazine, 17 July 2013
Eleonore Schönmaier…gives us these generously and subtly illuminated glimpses into rooms, conversations, lives…one also hears a constant music in the poetry. — Shawna Lemay, Canadian Poetries, 9 September 2013
[H]er poetry’s sensuality, and its corresponding intimations that well-being of any kind is the product of practiced intimacy…A generous and thoughtful collection…Schönmaier’s attention is paid in equal measure to music, ecology, family, loss and love. —Tina Northrup, The Antigonish Review, April 2014
She is able to find beauty everywhere and express it so that you are transported …Schönmaier is able to give voice to the connection she has with the world and make it splendid…This is accomplished poetry. —Michael Dennis, Today’s Book of Poetry, July 2016
Treading Fast Rivers (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
The natural world is prominent, almost dreamlike in Treading Fast Rivers, and starkly beautiful….Treading Fast Rivers is strong poetry. —Shane Neilson, Prairie Fire Review of Books
Schönmaier’s poetic world is a deftly-realized visual landscape….allowing her to examine—with clear-eyed perceptiveness—the territory of the heart. [Schönmaier] is alert to the sensual possibilities of the world. These poems…delight in the richness of experience. —Anne Simpson, Atlantic Books Today
Her poems open windows not so much onto but in their subjects…they describe a kind of reverence. —Susan Gillis, League of Canadian Poets
She has begun to make beauty.…wonderfully unforgettable. —M. Travis Lane, Fiddlehead
Schönmaier’s poetic gifts are apparent. —Christian Riegel, The Antigonish Review