There is no question in Barbara Ballé’s mind what ultimately led to her first book of poems, Life Jingling in My Pockets.

“It’s funny, because I was drawn to poetry all my life,” the Westsyde resident began.

A seed of Ballé’s search for poetic truth and beauty may have been planted when she was shipped in a boxcar with her family from Poland to Germany during the Second World War. It was 1943. She recalled standing in a barracks, watching German soldiers patrolling past barbed wire, feeling the dread of not knowing what might happen.

I am the fire, which always rages,

I am the hunger, never satisfied,

I am the despair of days gone by.

“By then Hitler understood that instead of killing people, you may as well put them to work, so we survived. We were quite lucky to survive.

“Since then I don’t like to be called Barb,” she added.

Back in postwar Poland, she endured the oppression of Soviet-bloc control, an iron fist that choked off artistic expression. She wrote her first poem inspired by a friend who had died, and then set it aside. She dreamed of a better life, a dream fulfilled by emigration to Canada in 1967.

“My soul was totally at peace. I could breathe.”

Flush with freedom, she still didn’t feel the poetic calling. After moving out West to Grand Prairie, studying at college, falling in love, getting married and having a family, the voice remained silent. Then, moved by the beauty of the Coast and encouraged by her family, she started writing again.

I was the foam of the waves,

and the white restless cloud.

In 1997 she underwent brain surgery to remove a benign turmour, a life experience she had not expected to survive. Surviving was a cathartic experience, one that plays out in her poems as an emotional counterbalance.

My mind is playing the tune of spring.

Ready to dance and skip like a child,

I am waving hands like a fool, full of dreams,

life jingling in my pockets.

She studied drama and creative writing at Capilano College, yet it wasn’t until Ballé and her husband moved to the Interior eight years ago that she began writing in earnest.

“A change of scenery is very important when you write poetry. All of a sudden things started to click in Kamloops. It seemed like, all of a sudden, I had more to say, and now I could say it in a better way.”

She joined the Interior Authors Group, which helped to develop her style along with her own continual drive to refine and improve. Bronwen Scott edited the collected verse in Life Jingling in My Pockets. Ballé’s second collection is set to be published and she’s working on a third.

“Poetry is like an emotion, that particular feeling you get. If it’s two or three in the morning, I have to get up and write it down. You just have to catch the moment and it’s so fragile.

“It’s hard work and very challenging. As a poet what I’m trying to do is say some truths about myself, about people and about nature, but I don’t want to be specific. Certain truths just come out.”

BOOKLAUNCH

WHO: Barbara Ballé celebrates her first book of poems, Life Jingling in My Pockets.

WHEN: Saturday, 11 a.m.-2 p.m.

WHERE: Chapters

ALSO: Feb. 12, 1-3 p.m. at Bookland; Feb. 13, 1-3 p.m. with a book signing and reading at At Second Glance Books