Enter the beauty of the verdant rainforest through Diana Hayes’s full-colour photographs and glorious poems in Labyrinth of Green. It’s the “dwelling place” Diana writes from and where she finds home “following the in-breath / verdant and timeless.” (“All That Quiet, He Says”)

Diana’s new book, Labyrinth of Green (Plumleaf Press, 2019) , is a wonder to behold. “Lost in Cedar, Duck Creek 2019 is the photograph that welcomes the reader into the book (on the cover and inside).

The preface is by Eliane Leslau Silverman, Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies, University of Calgary, who says of Diana that she “walks calmly and yet boldly with wide-open eyes.” This is such an apt description of the woman I’ve been getting to know through the years through a shared passion for poetry and this place, the West Coast of Canada. Diana does such a respectful honouring in her words and photographs.

In her introduction, Diana says: “There are special places in the world that speak directly to the soul .” The “inner journey” that led to her poems “unfolded in a most circuitous way, in various locations and times . . . “ She has walked labyrinths in the Temple of Good Will in Brasilia, at Glendalough in Co. Wicklow, Ireland, at Meteora and Delphi in Greece, and “at home, in a private labyrinth on Salt Spring Island.” That’s where she has found the sea “is never beyond a good walking distance, and the chorus of trees provides an orchestra of arms that protect the verdant waters of the marsh and wetlands.”

At midlife in a new home, Diana refines the journey, moving deeper, she writes, “into an inner sanctum of belonging, a place where I listen carefully with unbridled heart to the cycles of nature, the flora and fauna, reflecting back on my own nature and the seasons.” Diana extends this invitation to listen, to us.

“Deeper into the Forest” is the title of the first of five thematic sections and the title of a painting by Phyllis Webb, also a Salt Spring Island resident. The poem of the same title is a tribute to Phyllis Webb’s painting, an image of which is included in the Introduction. “Through her artist’s eye, I find a threshold to this hidden world of green where sky and water merge,” Diana says.

In this first section of poems, the poet regards the beauty and the equal threat of nature, two sides of the whole “as is the truth in human nature.”

Open me like a book, I say to the poet on the page 
praising the tiny nameless flowers 
insects and acorns that fill the forest night

the narrator says in “Walk to the Wetlands” about the experience of drought even in a rainforest.

How long this magic light hangs 
in the conifer boughs, dancing in autumn windows 
our house settled deep in this labyrinth of green

(from “How Long This Magic Light?”)

In “All These Roses” the poet refers to “Dr. Parker’s garden” where Diana and her husband Peter now live. They purchased the property from Drs. John and Zillah Parker in 2014 thereby inheriting Dr. J. Parker’s Treasure Trove rose “that entwines a 120-foot grand fir tree and all the creatures of the wetlands: the raucous Canada geese and other waterfowl, along with a symphony of tree frogs and formidable birds of prey.”

Diana Hayes dwells in a special place, a West Coast temperate rainforest on a Gulf Island in the Salish Sea:

This home, our dwelling place, tucked
in the labyrinth of green.
How it presses on with certainty
following the in-breath, verdant and timeless
a spring leaf in a treasured book
opening to this very page.

(from “All That Quiet, He Says”)

In “A Moment’s View” the photographer and poet combine their eloquence:

Fish-eye aperture scans the valley
offering spring a place to kneel.

To begin Part II, “At the Foot of the Ladder,” Diana includes an epigraph from our mutual mentor and teacher Patrick Lane: “Only words / can fly for you like birds . . “

She writes in the introduction to the section of skipping class to sit in the library’s poetry section. “Poems became prayers and translations for my passion” she writes. From the age of twelve, she was “knitting poems into tiny homemade journals.”

Part III, “Cartography of Genes,” is a section of poems and photographs that resulted from Diana’s ancestor research which took her to prairie landscapes and down country lanes of Ireland and Britain. She writes that the ornamental allium in her garden “became a representation of my family tree, photographed at varied stages of bloom and decline, in alternating light and shadow, sometimes mingling with stars and blue skies, shape-shifting as my grandmother and great-grandfather drifted in and out of my discoveries and dreams.”

The photograph to the left is “Looking for Cornelius – Inis Mor, Galway Ireland, 1996.”

In the notes at the back of the book, Diana says she was “blessed to live in a household that welcomed our extended family and included my maternal grandparents. My grandmother was my inspiration and mentor. She taught me to listen carefully to all the creatures and to trust my instincts on our daily sojourns along the lakeshore in front of our maritime red brick house.”

“Quicksand in the Qu’Appelle Valley” is from one of her grandmother’s stories from her early years homesteading near the town of Nokomis in Saskatchewan. Family memories can be shocking as is this one of a gelding trapped in quicksand, “a liquefied portal.” “He could see his own end before it arrived.”

In “Jack’s Secret,” Diana walks the corridor of final days with her father on the palliative ward of Lions Gate Hospital. The photographs and the memories in alternating light and shadow.

“Notations on a Map – Looking for Cornelius” is a poem in ten parts in which Diana writes of her ancestral search for her paternal great-grandfather born in Co. Cork, Ireland. It is dedicated to “My Great-Grandfather, Cornelius John Hayes.”

“Poems connect us,” Diana writes in her introduction to Part IV, “Thirteen Ways to Free a Crow.”

“They are ambassadors when grief blinds us, when joy takes our breath away, when memories visit in the night and don’t leave a name . . . they offer a map to the heart, a path otherwise lost in the helter-skelter of our too-busy minds. And finally, poems are followed by silence, the space between words, the knowing that cannot be told with language.”

She dedicates the first poem in this section, “Recipe for a Poem,” to Susan Musgrave. Diana and were part of a workshop with Susan, hosted by Tina Biello in Nanoose Bay, on Vancouver Island, in August 2017.

The photo is entitled “Tipi Ten, 2107” which is the name of our group of ten writers meeting in a tipi at the home of Tina Biello and Patty Cooper in Nanoose Bay.

Diana went on to gather the same group together for a weekend on Salt Spring Island, some of us staying at her home.

Besides doing her own work of poetry and photography, Diana has helped to organize events for others so they can share their work in community. We had an evening of readings at the Salt Spring Library along with Susan Musgrave after which, people went back to Diana and Peter’s home for the commingling that is my favourite part of poetry readings.

In 2014, when my book, Fishing for Mermaids was published, Diana organized a reading on Salt Spring for me and Lorraine Gane whose new book was The Blue Halo. Both of us were published by Leaf Press.

Diana started Salt of the Earth Productions in 1984 which became Salt Spring Theatre Alive Society. Through the years she assisted with theatre productions and literary arts productions along with Brian Brett and Sharon Doobenen.

“J. J. & Oakley, Gone” was written while Diana attended a weekend poetry retreat with Patrick Lane in Honeymoon Bay on Vancouver Island. It was probably one of the last retreats Patrick gave. He died in March of 2019. The poem was “stirred” by a tragic logging accident that happened the same weekend near Caycuse on Lake Cowichan. (The photograph is entitled “Cowichan Lake Mist, 2019.”)

I can imagine Patrick appreciating the details and the names like Jimmy Jacks and Skutz Falls and lines like “the lake rose up that morning higher than a bastard behind the barn” in Diana’s poem as that’s how the characters mentioned may have talked. “Way to go kid,” Patrick may have said to Diana after she read her poem and after he offered some suggestions.

Part V “Awakening” begins with an epigraph by Raymond Carver from “Late Fragment”: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life even so?”

“For the poet,” Diana says, “bearing witness is an act of compassion transformed in verse.” In this section she writes of her dear friend and spirit guide, Sikundar Umedaly, who passed away March 14, 2105.

“The Angel of Abadiania” first appeared in an article I wrote about Diana for SAGE-ING, an online journal. That’s how Diana and I first met. The article, with her poems, “Sacred Art: The Poetry and Photography of Diana Hayes,” appeared in Creative Aging edited by Karen Close and Carolyn Cowan (Northstone, 2015). The poem was written for a “gifted physician from Origlio, Switzerland – Wania Roggiani, whom I met while on a healing journey to Brazil,” writes Diana.

The section is named for the poem “Awakening” which is the name of a painting by Ruth Ray. Ray’s paintings took Diana “on a journey of discovery” and the particular painting was a “jumping-off point” for “Insomnia’s Notebook,” an eight-part poem of a “lucid dreamer who dances in the shadows of insomnia’s corridor.”

The final poem, “All Shining and Silver,” is dedicated, as was the first poem in Labyrinth of Green, to Phyllis WebbA labyrinth has a centre, to which we walk towards, and then a returning to where we began. The photo on the inside of the back cover is again” Lost in Cedar, Duck Creek, 2019.” We end where we began.

How wonderful that Diana found a publisher, Plumleaf Press, who has presented her stunning poetry and photography so exquisitely. I so appreciate Diana’s connection to her special place on earth: she as part of Nature that surrounds her and Nature as part of her.

Diana isn’t always on land. She also appreciates the ocean year round. In 2002, Diana established an open water swim team of like-minded women. They call themselves The Salt Spring Seals and they’ve been swimming year round ever since, watching sea life through their masks.

The launch of and reception for Labyrinth of Green: Poems and Photographs by Diana Hayes will take place on Saturday, September 28th at 7:30 p.m. in the Community Program Room of the Salt Spring Public Library.

If you are unable to attend but would like to buy the book, it can be ordered directly through the publisher info@plumleafpress.com or www.rubiconpublishing.com/product/labyrinth-of-green-pre-order, or of course, through your local bookstore (Jaguar book distributors).

Also, have a look at Diana’s website at www.dianahayes.ca