Leila Pepper, now in her late 80s, lives Windsor, Ontario where she grew up. Her poetry is tough-minded, direct and frank in its telling. She writes with defiance about death, about the loss of youth and the uncertainty of the future. Yet she also mocks her own age.
She has appeared on a number of national radio and television shows, because she addresses the big concerns over love and Alzheimer's disease and growing old. She writes with a frankness that can be surprising.
Leila began writing poetry in her 70s and studied under the late W.O. Mitchell when he was writer in residence at the University of Windsor.
She has published several critically acclaimed books with Black Moss Press. |
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 The Hidden World
Leila Pepper is a defiant and honest writer who rails against old age with the poems in this newest collection, The Hidden World. She tackles the subject of death, a preoccupation that plagues some elderly people. She writes how she wonders “if death comes easily/like rolling over or/turning out the light.” She writes about watching a television science show where scientists are exploring the ravages of old age on the brain, and watches one of these individuals slicing into the brain to see what they might find. But Pepper isn’t afraid. She tackles old age, the slowness that comes to the limbs, the forgetfulness, the problems with other people’s perceptions that you begin to shut down, and aren’t as sharp. She writes that she feels “immersed in the warmth of everyday life.”
Poetry, Palm Poets Series, 96 pages, $17.95
ISBN 0-88753-373-6
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Love Poems For Several Men
..a collection of poems which enchantingly draws the reader into a world of ultimate love and loss, religious scrutiny, but most of all, life after death.
– ROOM Magazine
Leila Pepper draws on more than 80 years of experience as she writes, with disarming frankness, of the love relationships of her life. Her defiantly-honest verse depicts funerals, summer storms, forgetting people's names, and betrayal in love. She mourns the loss of her youth, understanding her own mortality as she sees old friends dying. However, her sense of humour and joie de vivre triumph at times, tempering her very realistic outlook on her experiences with an optimistic sense of living in the moment.
Poetry, 64 pages $14.95
ISBN 0-88753-298-5
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