Paul Hiebert Reads Sarah Binks
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PR9299H63S37_back
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Side OnePaul Hiebert reads Sarah BinksWhen SARAH BlNKS first appeared in 1947 it won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for its author, Paul Hiebert. Since then it has become a Canadian classic in the field of laughter. Now Paul Hiebert's voice preserves for posterity the fictional Sarah's most memorable poetic utterances.Canada is fortunate, and in particular the prairie provinces are fortunate, in having had in SARAH BlNKS a writer whose lyricism could, to quote her biographer, express "the beauty of field and sky and rain-drenched hill, of prairie swept by storm, of dazzling alkali flat, of hot fallow land in the sun of the summer afternoon, of the misty pastels of spreading time." She is the voice of the prairie west from the Pre-Cambrian Shield of Manitoba to the foothills of Alberta.Sarah started writing as a young girl, her works appearing in the well-known papers SWINE and KINE and THE HORSEBREEDER'S GAZETTE. But her real recognition as a poet came with her award of a horse thermometer which she won in open competition for poetry in a stock conditioner contest. Later, after her great epic, UP FROM THE MAGMA AND BACK AGAIN, had been written, she was awarded the Wheat Pool Medal and an L.L.D. from St. Midgets College. She has very rightly been called "The Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan," and scholars have acclaimed her as having raised literature in Canada to its highest prairie level.Among Sarah's poems on this record are such favorites as HERE COMES CAESAR and Hi, SOOKEY. In the latter Sarah gives something of a spiritual quality to the simple chore of feeding the pigs, which is not generally so poetically regarded. In fact, it may be said that she has sublimated the chore and in a deeper sense the poem is actually a love poem. The listener will find, too, Sarah's translations, parts of which the critic, Von Knodel, has justifiably dubbed "masterful."PAUL HIEBERT'S achievements in both the humanities and science are impressive. Upon obtaining his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Manitoba in 1916 he was awarded the University Gold Medal. In 1917 he graduated from the University of Toronto with a Master of Arts. Further studies at Toronto and McGill University earned him his Ph.D. in Physics and Chemistry as well as the Governor General's Medal for Science in 1924. The same year Paul Hiebert became a professor of Chemistry at the University of Manitoba where he was to teach for twenty-eight years. Shortly after SARAH BlNKS was published he was appointed President of the Winnipeg Branch of the Canadian Authors' Association.His volume devoted to the life and works of his imaginary heroine, Sarah, is his greatest literary success. But he is also the author of other books, the best known of which is WILLOWS REVISITED which deals with Sarah's modern successors, the famous School of Seven and a Half.Paul Hiebert resides in Carman, Manitoba. When he was recorded for this album he was eighty years of age.
