June's Poems

June's Poems Description

June Green did not take up writing poetry until she was nearly 70, when failing eyesight robbed her of most of her customary activities and she needed some-thing else to pass the time. There was no thought of publication, and each subject was just what she happened to think of on that day, with no relationship to the other poems. It was immediately apparent that she had hit on an activity for which she had a natural talent, completely untaught, and as the poems accumulated it also be-came plain that some of them might be combined to tell a number of stories. Eventually she had many of the poems printed in two small booklets for family distribution, and the ones that dealt with her childhood on a Saskatchewan farm during the depression years were also published in a newspaper there, earning considerable acclaim. After her death at 83 it turned out that there were almost enough additional poems to print a third book-let and the decision was made to include everything, along with most of the illustrations she had chosen, in this single volume, roughly organized by subject, time and location.