My Kitchen Window
Poems by Edna Jaques

My Kitchen Window
Edna Jaques (1891-1978), author
Toronto: Thomas Allen, Ltd., 1935
Dustjacket price: $1.00

This edition: Seventh printing, 1945.

This blog post created by Mary Katherine May of QualityMusicandBooks.com.

Dustjacket illustration by artist Maude Paget. (1873-1967)

Dustjacket promotional text by Nellie L. McClung:
When poems are cut out of newspapers and pinned above sinks, and committed to memory by busy women in house dresses as they peel potatoes or wash dishes; when men in overalls, following the plow on a hot dry day, stop at the headlands to rest their team and, sitting on the plow handles, read over and over from a little scrap of newspaper what this same poet has written; when people on street are coming to work, or at noon hour eating their lunch, refresh their souls by doing the same and pass the poem around, thus beginning a discussion on things present and thing to come; when people sit down to write a letter of sympathy to a bereaved friend and, not knowing how to express the grief they feel, search their scrapbook for a little poem that says it all in words as light and soft as thistledown that cannot possibly bruise a sore heart, has not such a poet achieved fame? 

Edna Jaques is such a poet, a scrapbook poet, a loose leaf poet, writing every day the things she sees and feels. 

For Heaven lies about us everywhere,

And God is close, for every blade of grass

Sings on the wind like ancient lines of prayer,

And all the world is hushed to watch Him pass.   Life (p.8)

Poems Included in My Kitchen Window
My Kitchen Window contains 75 poems by Edna Jaques.
My Kitchen Window, Watching at Windows, My Work-Bench, Above the Timber-Line, This Summer Day, Life, Encouragement, Prayer for the New Year, I So Love Earth, Growing Old, Thankful for What?, It Wouldn't Be Fall, Inner Life, A Born Farmer, We Thank Thee,

When I Come Home at Night, Spring Comes, The Mother, Such Little Things, To the Old Poor, Fall, Canterbury Bells, Singing at His Work, The Song My Kettle Sings, Colors, Riches, Three Beggars, To Be Content, Sunday Morning in Church, At Eventide, Joyce...of Course,

The Carpenters, My Dreams, A Dream House, September, A Mother at Night, Vacant Lots, Forty, Eve Created, Getting Ready for Winter, The Holy Land, Childhood, Trees, The Faithful Few, I Know God's Near, Home-Loving Hearts,  

Building a Nation, To a City Child, Little Hills, The Old Farmer, My Garden, To an Old Nickel, Small Deeds, After Holidays, The First Born, Things He Loved, Homesick for Earth, To My Own Canada, Small Lovely Things, My Ancestors, Infinite, Prairie Bred, 

The Great-Grandfather, My Dog, Poverty, Ships, A Shut-In Speaks, Home-bodies, A Girl-Mother Wonders, A Mother at Christmas, A Prayer for Wisdom.

My favorite poems in this volume: Trees, I Know God's Near, and Building a Nation.

Patient old trees, like sentinels they stand,

Part of the quiet earth, the fragrant night;

God's loveliest handiwork, they spread their arms

To catch the glory of the eternal light.   Trees (p. 47)

Another Canadian poet, John McCrae (1872-1918) wrote In Flanders Fields that captured the emotional affect the death toll of the soldiers in battle.  Edna Jaques replied with a work of her own, In Flanders Now (not in this book), that was read at the unveiling of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington D.C. 

Hymnary.org shows one entry from Edna Jaques, Some Blessed Day My Lord Will Call. LINK

LINK to article about Edna Jaques in the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan.

Jaques Autobiography

Edna Jaques wrote an autobiography, Uphill All the Way.  Currently out of print, it is available used in libraries and on many internet book sites.