Images overrun the world. Toons filled with rage and hate hunger for life. A war between simulations and humans. People besieged in a castle of dreams. A mysterious knight shifts between worlds, holding the secret that could save all. Orphaned children lead him to the whirlwind, the terrible faceless source. B.W. Powe's stunning fable erases the lines between illusion and reality. Visionary, poet, novelist, essayist, B.W. Powe is the author of the influential books, Mystic Trudeau, The Solitary Outlaw and Towards a Canada of Light, the novel Outage and the book of poetry, The Unsaid Passing (Guernica, 2005). The latter was a finalist for the ReLit Prize. He was the program coordinator for three significant symposia - Marshall McLuhan: What If He Was Right? (1997), The Trudeau Era (1998), and Living Literacies (2002), all held at York University.
I've just finished These Shadows Remain, and am quite haunted by the book. It is, to say the least, intriguing, and its resonances are onlysettling in... An enigmatic, striking piece of writing, one I shall return to.
Charles Foran
A vector of restless vitality flows through the works of B.W. Powe. From the early A Climate Charged (1984) to his recent These Shadows Remain, Powe's finely-tuned and poetic sensibility is an antenna for the unheard sounds and invisible waves coursing through the networks of contemporary life. He has both ear and eye to decode the electro-acoustic dramas of our global theatre... As readers of Powe will appreciate, his is an uneasy optimism, hard-won over years as a skeptic who probes obsessively into the night-lit alleys of contemporary life. While These Shadows Remain presents a vision of Blakean redemption and deep compassion for our children, the war of images against humanity still casts its shadows.
Marshall Soules
An impassioned chronicler. His words seem to emanate fully formed from the cosmos... Ecstatic moments... hair-raising lines.
The Globe and Mail