My Own Places

Add to the list of “Books The Traveller Carried While Writing Hillsdale: An Auto-Geography” Don Kerr’s My Own Places: poems on John Constable, an homage to the 19th-century English landscape painter. “One regionalist discovering another,” as Kerr notes. A beautiful UCalgaryP book from 2006, with several lovely colour reproductions of Constable paintings and drawings. Kerr’s poems take us to Constable and to Kerr, take us out and take us in. They show us how and why Constable “paints [his] own places best,” as Constable noted in an 1821 letter, cited by Kerr as an epigraph to Section 1. And Kerr does this by painting, so to speak, his own places best.

Thus inspired, the traveller spends the morning walking and photographing.