Reviews
"Schellenberg's collection is a love letter to these four people [grandparents] whose lives were so completely intertwined with hers." Kyla Neufeld, Prairie Books Now, Spring/Summer 2020 [Full article at https://prairiebooksnow.ca/articles/view/poet-reflects-on-her-grandparents-lives-through-poetry-and-collected-letters-artifacts]
"Schellenberg's best poems don't offer easy answers, and do a good job of letting the question lie."—Jonathan Ball
"While most of the book's poems are based on personal connections Schellenberg built with her grandparents over the years, she also explores topics of their ancestry, immigration, and courtship.... Some of the poems touch on the poignant theme of loss..." [Full review at https://nivervillecitizen.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/former-nivervillians-second-book-reflects-on-grandparents]—Brenda Sawatzky
"Fields of Light and Stone excavates the relationships between Schellenberg's Mennonite grandparents.The book moves among various styles and source materials as through sheaves of distinct documents" [Full article at https://canlit.ca/article/sinews-and-sheaves/]—Carl Watts, Canadian Literature
"I was immediately attracted to its contents because of the illustration on the jacket (Last Embrace by Miriam Rudolph). Between the covers are poems that sing of love and loss. Schellenberg's playful use of words is evident throughout. This book will resonate with those writing memoirs or translating old letters and will perhaps inspire others to do so. Not that long ago, I sat with the boxes of correspondence my parents had left behind after they passed away. Many of the thoughts Schellenberg expresses in her creative, poetic style went through my mind at that time and they linger still. She has left a tribute to her grandparents that will stand the test of time."—Elfrieda Neufeld Schroeder, Mennonite History, December 2020
# 1 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, February 14, 2021
"Schellenberg's Fields of Light and Stone enacts the terms of her title with its tender and exacting invocations of familial love. [O]ne of the delicate strengths of Schellenberg's poems of mourning is their fresh grief at old losses. Fields of Light and Stone has a light touch that never confuses love for denial of death, and Angeline Schellenberg finds painful beauty in the imperfections of mourning."—Tanis MacDonald, Journal of Mennonite Studies, 2021
Endorsements
"In Fields of Light and Stone, Angeline Schellenberg turns to old love letters, datebooks, sermon notes, archived genealogies, and her own memory in a quest to understand her biological and spiritual heritage. Her search uncovers a treasure trove of courage and betrayal, love and loss. Through the alchemy of honed poetic skills and unflinching insight, her findings are transformed into evocative and personal poems that honour beloved grandparents and will echo long in the minds and memory of her readers."—Sarah Klassen
"Angeline Schellenberg performs acts of remembrance that are all the more poetic for being scrupulously plainspoken, like their subjects. As I read these lyrical, earthbound gestures, Denise Levertov's lines about her own ancestors, who 'prayed with the bench and the floor' kept coming back to me. Fields of Light and Stone is a series of love letters to the dead that makes its own eloquence out of 'what was at hand,' musical like a western meadowlark, ordinary like a well-worn burlap sack—an elegy to cherish."—Don McKay
