The poems in Any Waking Morning probe deeply into love, loss, and life’s darker dilemmas. They seek pathways and meaning, interrogate endings and life changes, and tap the creative energy engendered through art’s ekphrastic cycles. While foregrounding the influence of contemporary ideas on the author’s poetic explorations, the collection returns inevitably to images, insights and experiences from the Caribbean and the author’s early life. Unfolding in four sections: “The Way Light Falls,” “Unmasked,” “Beyond Convergence,” and “Fragments and Heartwood,” Soutar-Hynes’ images are vividly pictorial.

Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes, is a Jamaican-Canadian, poet/educator and former nun. A Fellow at Scotland's Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Fall 2009, her literary publications include the collections: Travelling Light (2006), long-listed for the 2007 ReLit Poetry Award, and The Fires of Naming (2001). Her poetry appears in the anthologies: Calling Cards: New Poetry from Caribbean/Canadian Women (2005); Garden Variety, An Anthology of Flower Poems (2007); and Resonance: Poetry and Art (2008), and in journals such as Quills, The Toronto Quarterly, Arc, and Lichen. She has lived in Toronto since her arrival in 1969.

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