Walking Upstream

Author: Lloyd Ratzlaff
ISBN: 9781771872706 Categories: Poetry, Canadian Tags: ,
Publication Date: 8 April, 2025
Dimensions: 2.36 x 3.15"

A debut poetry collection, both lyrical and surprisingly playful, about overcoming a harsh evangelical upbringing and seeking consolation from the beauty of the natural world.

This collection by the author of three books of nonfiction takes readers into one man’s struggle to escape the corrosive effects of a punishing religion. We meet the small, frightened boy afraid of hell-fire and eternal guilt, and decades later, the man kicking free of the habit of self excoriation.

There is humour in the observation of the antics of birds, especially magpies and other corvids, and profound humility in the struggle to resist a confining culture.

Excerpt from Walking Upstream:

Magpie, I love you more
for your flight and strut
than for your
squawk,
but can’t vilify a creature
ten times tougher than I am
and a hell of a lot more handsome.

We walk with the poet-as-flaneur through neighbourhoods and along the river in a small prairie city, observing the incongruities, absurdities, and startling images and sounds of city life. And with the mystic who believes in something far beyond himself, so the beetle he sees on a path is “a little Buddha,” and the wind and the flowing river are “irresistible forces,” while a pine teaches him “how you move / without going / anywhere.”

About the Author

Lloyd Ratzlaff is a former minister, counsellor, and university lecturer who has authored three books of literary nonfiction and edited an anthology of seniors’ writings and a children’s book. He was a finalist for three Saskatchewan Book Awards, won two Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild literary nonfiction awards, and served on the boards of several writing organizations. He was a columnist for Prairie Messenger Catholic Journal through its last nineteen years of publication, and taught writing classes for READ Saskatoon, the Western Development Museum, and the University of Saskatchewan’s Certificate of Art and Design program. Walking Upstream is his first poetry collection. He lives in Saskatoon.

Reviews

“In this bright and supple collection of lyric reckonings, Lloyd Ratzlaff’s humble speakers attend to multitudes. Everything from God to gosling, clover to cuckoo, dogma to dogshit, and Buddha to bee serve as companions on a path of call and response to our world. In the best way, we are re-minded. This book will refresh all who read it.”
—Gerald Hill, author of Crooked at the Far End and Hillsdale Book

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