Miranda Pearson’s Rail (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019)

The simple place and emotion-based lyric is often dismissed or even disdained in this era when, if your poetry has no overt sexual, racial or other trendy engine behind its impetus, and such content isn’t rendered in complexified form, then it seems antiquated, irrelevant, too obvious for these mangled (and yes also emancipatory) times. A shame, mostly. I qualify this statement because it can appear thus – as if the lyric from a non-politicized perspective (though, of course, one could argue that the angle from which anything is examined is political – as one did in the 70s), is a now-tired tune, a side-stepping ditty of emptiness, a rococo so what. Miranda Pearson’s Rail only occasionally made me fall into that feeling and mainly when an ending trailed off as in “Degas Women,” whose promise felt curtailed or when a metaphor was super same old same old like “Magdalene” with its portrayal of personified trees with “boney fingers” and “wild grey hair.”

More often however, the compressed intensities and essential groundings of the lyric are evident in Pearson’s poems. And since when are depictions of nature, relationship, or aging passe? I certainly don’t want to live in a world, as Bertolt Brecht said,

“…when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors.”

The first poem, “Camber Sands,” plunges the reader into the collection’s overriding tone: a graceful melancholia, an elegant engagement with time and locale. I hear Patti Smith’s meanderings in M Train at the start of the piece: “the sand drifted on to our shores/and into the corners of the Kit-Kat cafe” and at the end’s return: “the beach grass and long-beaked curlew…the cafe boarded up for winter. /The sand.” Pearson rarely wows with her sounds but she does pursue a consistent and quiet music in words such as chevron, floe, chivalrous, hedgerows – some diction, invariably, “Kentish,” others derived from the Scots, like the strange term “Hentilagets,” meaning clumps of sheep’s wool. Rail is most potent when it offers the tightly honed lyric like the perfect “Fox” (of course reminiscent of but not imitative of Ted Hughes). In three exquisite quatrains it accurately describes the animal while accessing the residue of its mystery too in “Beauty you wish you could/touch but it breaks away,/a sprinter in cinnamon or rust…Over the green/contours of the field, /her supple canter. But silent,/silent. Answering the dark.” Yum!

As a half-Brit, the landscapes that Pearson sketches resonate with me, from Brighton to Whitby, these being her most powerful pieces, along with those that depict her mother’s quirks and eventual unraveling (especially the tender convolutions of what may be a last Scrabble game in “Stroke”) Also, the three part elaboration on a paint box that contains the startling concept of a friendship that is still able to “wick” and the stunning resonance of the final couplet – “Line, line – /I have forgotten how to feel sorrow.” Although I would have axed the sequence Abacus as it seemed clunky, a stumbly departure from the flow of the other poems (and also, I loathe math ;), the remainder of Rail, though not a fashionable railing against per se, is a strong and solid line through land and memory, giving the reader a reliable melody to live within.

Moorings by Christopher Levenson (Caitlin Press, 2023)

Longevity is not praised sufficiently in the Canadian literary world. There is such an obsession for the youthful “first booker” and their MFA path to academic-fed celebrity, that many other journeys get dismissed, whether it’s that of the non-institutionalized poet or the one who has published twenty books or the one who has (as we all do if fortunate) gotten old. Christopher Levenson is nearing 90 and, although he’s received a GG nomination and was a founding member of ARC magazine, for the most part, he’s been liminalized by the presses that publish him, and the reception he hasn’t truly received. I was thinking, as I read Moorings, a beautifully-designed book with smaller proportions and a waxy blast of rusted colour on the cover, that it isn’t the content that draws me to Levenson’s work per se but his obvious ear. Not that, as the by-line states, this isn’t a “profound exploration of aging, loss and friendship” but what makes his poems work beyond this perhaps-typified subject matter is the lyrical motions of his lines on the page. The reader is drawn in immediately by the six-piece poem Lost and Found: a Sequence, an Elizabeth Bishop-inspired meditation on all we must relinquish in our existence. He begins: “A single sock, bus tickets, a quarter/swaddled in lint” and the attention to the “s” and “t” sonorities, the “i” assonance, and the image of the lint as swaddling a coin as if it were an infant all contribute to the compelling entrance. The book is organized in five sections: The Past is a Foreign Country, Latecomer, Brushstrokes, The Camps and Moorings, dealing with the past, travel, relationships (especially with his long-term spouse Oonagh), art, difficult histories, and aging.

“It is an intricate business, growing old” Levenson states in the titular poem, and I am finally starting to relate to the way, “No handbooks or charts exist for this rocky coast.” In the next piece, Face, he expands on the crushing disjuncture of the internal versus the external, of how “cosmetics cannot gloss over /wars, childbirth,” and how we gradually replace parts with the artificial as he asks is “what emerges/after the anesthetic still us/an amalgam?” I love his elegy for Elise Partridge, his acknowledgement that one cannot keep traveling as one did (“I am on stand-by”) and his belief throughout Moorings that always, “We are still left with questions” (Memorial Service.) Returning to earlier sections, I am moved by the poem Insects where he learns, “There are no bad animals,” the ghost trains and marmalade, the Fridge piece where a simple household appliance becomes a “midden for future archeologists” and Canadian travel lyrics such as At the Races from Vancouver (“Somehow the horses/survive it all, sweat and beauty proudly intact,/and behind them always the mountains”) or In Kensington Market from Toronto with its gourmand and musical listings of “vegan, halal, kosher…ramen, jerky, goat – all you can eat/to the sound of heavy metal, steel bands, bongo drums.”

Poems like Cell or Touch provide poignant punctums within a life where we all must move, all must accept lessened forms of connection and the feeling that the virtual is overwhelming the real. And Levenson’s ekphrastic segment, although this form is challenging in how it asks the poet to transcend the details of the piece of art and transform the materials into feeling, mostly sings, especially in pieces like Goya (“No one else, as you did/could look straight into the brutal darkness”), Hopper (“You made everyday poetry”) and The Dutch Golden Age Exhibition where one goes to escape the hot summer while realizing that the individuals in the paintings suffered, “the stench, the heat no one could get away from.” The pieces on the Second World War are perhaps the hardest to read, both emotionally, but also in the way it’s difficult to re-infuse well-worn facts with feeling. Levenson’s attention to “twisted history,” alternative narratives, as with the poem on the failed invasion of Iceland, and the loss of trust in the land featured in poems like Infrastructure and Erosion work towards essential poignancy. Although a few poems fall into clicheed lines such as “now with tentative fingers/light gropes” (Aubades) or end awkwardly in an ellipsis as in Latecomer, Levenson has mostly created a taut and stirring collection in Moorings, a necessary and crafted account of the truths of being alive.

Teeth by Dallas Hunt (Nightwood Editions 2024)

It’s a real shame that the weird and disturbing backlash against Susan Haley’s review of Emily Riddle’s The Big Melt in The Fiddlehead has made a lot of potential reviewers feel a certain fear (as recently evidenced by a Facebook thread on the issue of review writing). Of being a “white” person writing a review of an Indigenous book; of daring to compose an honest and well-thought out appraisal of any poet’s work even, one that might include such valid acknowledgements as the fact that some sections could “lack in poetic complexity” or the “thematic unity seems a gimmick” or “a glossary or a few footnotes would have been helpful” (this amid much praise including “amazing,” “true and developing,” and noting how “the best poems” draw on new cultural tools). I also reviewed this book and while I took an alternate tone and approach, my feelings regarding the text’s strengths and weaknesses were similar. However, while my review was generally enjoyed or ignored (likely as it’s on my blog not a publicly-funded periodical), Haley was called all manner of names, including “racist,” and several members on the editorial board were canned for allowing this perfectly reasonable review to pass the censors. Even more shockingly, this is a first book and in no way, shape or form should any beginning author have the sway to pull the plug on a review of their work that was balanced and offering one intelligent perspective. If it was full of hate and derision obviously. But it wasn’t. And reputations have been ruined as a result. And the ripples of anxiety have continued. Can we write a “review” of a book that isn’t 100 percent gush? And especially if the author happens to be Indigenous (or any other liminalized group)? Isn’t being a true and respectful critic an honour to the work? And to art in general?

I begin with these thoughts because I’m about to review Dallas Hunt’s compelling but obviously imperfect (because everything is) book of poems called Teeth. Remember, I am reviewing a book of poems, not a person, not a culture, not an identity, except as it is conveyed within the work. The cover is fantastic, a corn husk jawbone against a black background, and the title evokes feelings of instant paranoia and nervousness, but also fierceness and grit. The opening poem (all are in lower case except titles), a long, skinny exploration of differing cultural notions of wilderness, hunting, and ritual, is super powerful. It veers between a survivalist program called “alone” where ray, a participant, expresses complex reactions to the killing of a squirrel for food (“i betrayed his trust”), the prior noting of a dead ankwacas (by the way, the melding of Cree names within their contexts is both smooth AND there is a glossary) as a friend thinks because the speaker is “cree” that he “will have/a prayer nested/in [his] pocket,/tobacco at the/ready” and the close where a description of how to skin a squirrel so you can make grease is inserted unsentimentally (“pull/steadily and slowly/until the skin has/worked itself over/the front legs/and head“). The intensity continues with pieces such as the litany “notes on grief” in sharp triplets that all begin with “grief is,” the brutal “169 anomalies” that interrogates the existence of unmarked graves amid the haunting of nuns who “used to break rulers” on his father’s hands, and Kaskitew Maskwa about a bear that chased his father while he was working for the “resource extraction industry,” leading him to break his leg, a source of both pain and anxiety. Yet Hunt still speaks for the entire picture where the maskwa has also “witnessed a world” falling apart around it, and is a creature starving due to the decimation of its land. Then in another part of the frame, there’s the piece, “There’s a poem for everyone” with its brave and problematizing acknowledgement: “i’m tired of indian poems” that asks us to “just imagine!” what a literary community, or a society would be like where Indigenous problems didn’t all have to lead back instantly to colonialism but existed just because “some of our relations are difficult” and where the imperative to be considered a true member of one’s Indigeneity didn’t require one to constantly write about “trauma and moose meat and berries.” Gutsy stuff. And humour too in poems like Wrinkles (“I just want to age/so i can find peace”), or Scratch Tickets with its exclamatory statements about black shoes that “clomp too loudly” and the giant outburst of delicate tenderness at the end: “we could be undone!” Yes, lots of tenderness. Poems such as Maskosiy with that anaphora of “i wanted” again starting each triad of lines that aim to encompass planetary care (“i wanted to house geese” but also “i wanted teeth that were a map of the world”) or A Sun after Sleeping where the teeth haunting unfolds in terrible yellow and fragments but also refuses to be broken, insisting that “brain cells reach/out for connections…let’s find our own suns.” Or Cruel Momentum where the speaker orders “bury me with my/plants,” accepting the eternal vulnerability in the truth that “sometimes love feels like finding another person to miss.” Occasionally, the poems seem a tad too slight, contain trite statements (“love saves/and destroys us”) or fall into excessive rhetoric (truly I comprehend the need to say such things but reading a piece that begins with the word “cathexis” and then continues with a sentence like: “it points to the perversity of a societal/structure and its attendant social relations, or the relations embedded /therein” is a snooze). But those moments are brief and I’ll be lingering on the notion that ends the book for a long time. Listen to this! Hunt concludes: “love names the ruin.” Pow. Bam. That truly was a necessary bite from a set of lyrically-honed incisors.

Excerpts from a Burned Letter by Joelle Barron (Nightwood Editions 2024)

I was just thinking. We inhabit such a rabid “first book” culture, due to the prevalence of MFA programs where writers essentially need one of those trophies to feel their degree has been worthwhile, that it’s easy to grow weary and jaded. Not only is this not a first book however (it’s Joelle Barron’s second) but Barron doesn’t emerge from that world where publishing seems merely another part of the required program. Having worked as a doula, parenting a daughter, living in Fort Frances (hardly one of the centres of Canada), undertaking iconoclastic and autodidactic forms of research, and living in queered interstices, all would appear to have sharpened Barron’s poetic eye and ear. Excerpts from a Burned Letter has been a bit of a revelation in the way I mostly like my poetry: fascinated by scholarship, taut with form, ringing with sonorities, unafeared of truths.

Shaped by queer desire but enabling the eros and its problematics to be framed by the epistolary genre, both imagined and real, is brilliant. Lesbian love within a convent is updated in the first sequenced piece by being melded with a girlhood experience at Sunny Cove camp where Barron’s ear is immediately apparent in such lines as: “Emotion drove into my hyoid bone, as if the butterfly/of my thyroid would rip apart its flesh cocoon, float bloodily/over the scream-bright water.” Having been raised a Catholic by an ex-nun mother, the significance of many of the religious allusions and holidays resonated with me. The guilt that always courses beneath the expression of every kind of selfhood and the forbidden. The piece, “Lilith to Eve, 2001” inhabits the voice of contemporary teens who show their “pubescent/tits to the early-2000s internet,” then meet up later on in life, unwilling to even discuss this “dark mythology,” but the invocation of the biblical figures adds that fused layer of deeper significance. Then, in the longer poem, “How Queer and Quiet it is” the histories of the word “queer,” especially as it appears “sixty-one times in The Secret Garden” or throughout Burnett’s story “In the Closed Room,” adds a cutting sub-text, both to the complexifying of the word itself and to the continual concealments in the lives of women who weren’t (or didn’t seek to be) normalized within their societies. All the epistle poems either feature possibly unknown names like “Elsie to Elizabeth, 2016” (“Home in our rococo womb” yes!) or definite historical personages, such as likely my favourite piece in the book, the couplet lyric “Aphrodite to Sappho, 2017” where “branches of malachite cast their acicular/beams, stringers of light….Let me/lay you down on this bed of invasive species.” For me, the poems where I could identify the figures were stronger as this layering of intent and import was potent, compelling my own research and allusion-hungry mind.

Lyrics that directly address the medical profession like “Phone Appointment” where the physician asks the usual questions about a woman’s experience of her compromised body such as, “Any pain?” and the speaker, versed in the impossibility of her reality being respected, notes, “what’s/the point in saying yes,” along with “Girldefined” that slams codified sexualization as entangled with religion until god is a “dude in a basement/ with a sign that says Man Cave./Hard at work creating the pussy” are powerful. It’s hard to say it like it is and still have it stand as a strong poem. Even more the case with “Ugly Pussy” that truly takes aim at the “mansplain” of academe where everything has to mean something else while Barron here has the awesome audacity to claim “poetry is how my trash mind” expresses things and thus, their craft “shoots lasers./ Pew pew!” Humour and a punch to the gut all at once. Just as with “Check all that Apply” where the speaker possibly identifies with a “1970s carpet sample” or the band name “Bitter Herb and the Rejected Gourds.” More yes. Only on occasion can the poems get too cutesy with titles that are superior to the actual pieces, like “I’m not a human I’m three poems in a trench coat” or ones that have too much Siri and Instagram in them for my liking (I can’t help it, I’m haunted by Robinson Jeffers.) But, like the last line proclaims, this dive into identity, history, sexuality, feeling and time is “lit from within” by its own wild fires.

Dear Ray by Donna Dunlop (Contact Press, 2019)

The subtitle of this book is A love poem for Raymond Souster, the Torontonian banker-poet who published more than 50 collections of poetry and founded Contact Press. Although there isn’t a Preface elaborating a little more upon their bond (and I do wish there was), the back jacket descriptor tells us that author Donna Dunlop “became close friends” with Souster “during the final decade of his life.” Well, they seem a little closer than just close to this reader and that’s lovely. Many older male Canadian poets seem to have been adopted in a sense by younger female poets later on in life: Pete Trower and Heather Haley for instance, myself and Joe Rosenblatt, Pat Lane and likely a bevy of them 😉 And obviously I don’t mean the relationship was necessarily sexual, but intimate, collaborative, supportive in many ways that sustained the older poet into his 70s, 80s, and even 90s as with Ray.

It’s a bit weird to review a long elegiac love poem. At it’s core a personal missive it is a means, as Dunlop admits at the end, for the griever to keep living: “If I were / to stop writing/ these poems to you/would my life end ?/ I think so.” And yet if it were just a mode of sentimental therapy, I wouldn’t bother critiquing it at all. For the most part, this book-length series of fragmented recollections of a poet, now legally blind and struck down with cancer, at the close of his long and productive life is moving due to the fine resonances of Dunlop’s musically-honed ear: “Stung and stunned/I blanked her words out…/until the next morning/when I came to your softly lit room/and your breath-gone body” or “The first spring/without you here to sing -/but your words gave them/ a second, more meaningful life/especially that somewhat/scraggly one tucked in close/to the front of your house.” Here there is a sophistication in the sonority; elsewhere, Dunlop can become overly chiming, rhyming “moon/blue/hue/through/rendezvous/1962” in practically as many lines. It’s a real challenge to balance one’s own grieving preoccupations with what a reader might find compelling. His musical faves? Fascinating. Whether he liked to drink Canada Dry or Cotts’ ginger ale? Not so interesting. And yet, mourning is completist. How can anything be cut when one wants to proffer as complete a picture of the beloved’s life as possible?

And thus also, the repetitions that haunt in relation to the “black telephone” whose number is dialled even though Dunlop knows that her poet-love “will not ring again/with [his] voice at the other end.” And even sometimes the awkward strains toward images that will encompass their unique connection. They are clinging to each other like “two sailors/on the high seas” or he is like “a line of birds.” The most stirring passages for me are in the hospital or care home where nurses are turning him or the concern is for lost orthotics or he is walking the night-time corridors with his radio playing low. And then, he dies and Dunlop is left asking a “solitary robin” the question “are you Ray?” even though she knows that “Ray was a sparrow.” Beautiful. And necessary. Dear Ray is a worthy homage and an essential read for anyone who has lost a deep love to time.

Asterisms by Donna Kane (Harbour Publishing 2024)

At the close of my review of Donna Kane’s last collection, I wrote: “The honed lyrics in Orrery (2020) feel mostly like genuine, real, human movements of awe and listening in the face of space and death and biology and time. And this, as a pursuit, constitutes the necessary core of poetry.” This claim remains true and even more powerfully so throughout her new book, Asterisms. “I combed/ the darkness for what I might find” is a line from one of her poems that could serve as a praxis for the entire vision. Kane is writing at the true peak of lyric intensity here, her ear honed, her curiosity about everything from the Artemis program to frogs to the Incredible Hulk evidenced in pieces that explore depths in small spaces of language and feeling. The prefatory poem is rhymed and features a repeating line you sense came to Kane in the middle of the night: “Knowledge is the fruiting body of light” and that she trusted the sounds and wrote it down, then let it lead her further in to its own sonorous wisdom. She’s not afraid of making pure statements that could be deemed too simple, when they are actually plumbings of what it means to be fully alive. Lines such as those that begin the poem “Wayfinder” : “I just want to be happy./I like the springtime sounds of wood frogs/I think an earthworm’s five hearts are sweet./I don’t like to think of the world as bloodied.” She knows the “red in tooth and claw” of nature but, more vitally, she wants to maintain awe and wonder towards the world, as this is the nexus of being truly human.

Kane sometimes gets cutesy with her imagery as when she envisions the ladybug folding “each wing like a napkin” (Perennial) or a bit too nursery-chimey in the last poem that repeats, “The elephant or the shrew/the me or the you,” (Love Poem for Every Animal on Earth) but these slippages are rare. Asterisms, even in its tiniest pieces, is sleekly stirring, as with the best poems by Charles Wright or H.D., philosophical musings meeting the most precise gaze and the tautest lyricism. I loved the sonnet “Nonda Creek Alpine” with its final haunting stanza: “Surely, breath’s rhythm is the heart of want –/in and then out, in and then out.” Also Pigs (“I was surprised to learn pigs have the capacity to dream”), all the meditative “On” pieces but especially “On Memory” with its “nectar in an uncapped cell,” the tangible frustrations of being a person expressed in the poem, “Perched as I Feel, between Inner and Outer” who must navigate the “pebbled topographies/of avocados” and who can’t even open a plastic bag easily but desires to see her “four-chambered heart,” Kane’s admission that she dreads “the end of beauty” and so harvests early (Beauty), and her awareness of the mysteries aging brings in Jetlag (“Age is a place we learn from brochures/or hearsay”). And O! the short piece that one could re-read a thousand times called “Morning Thoughts of Death While Watching a Horse Cross a Snowy Field.” Also, the acknowledgement of scientific failings in experiments on the horseshoe crab, the melancholic questionings of “Winter Solstice” (“My shadow grew so long I could see where I was going before I arrived”) and then the humorous hissing-out of an inflatable snowman in “New Year’s Party” where “Frosty’s a spent condom.” The tones and forms are varied and balanced in Asterisms as Kane asks poignantly, “Are we well?” Knowing the answer is no. Celebrating what is left of the yes anyway.

Cathedral/Grove by Susan Glickman (Signal Editions 2023)

I remember when I was plundering the poetry section of the Burnaby Public Library as a teenager and I came across Susan Glickman’s Henry Moore’s Sheep. I was instantly compelled by her work, and am now happy, so many years later, to be writing a review of her 8th collection of poems, Cathedral/Grove. On her website, Glickman bemoans the contrast between the number of reviews her initial collection received in the 80s and the few her books now can claim. This is a huge issue in Canadian poetry. Not only does there need to be more pay for critics and further avenues for their reviews to be published, but a review culture must be encouraged within all these MFA programs, in which to review a book is indeed an honour, as one is contributing to dialogue, thought and meaning, thereby growing and maturing the literary world. The only negative reviews are ones written from an utter dislike of the book at hand. If one appreciates any part of the collection, then one can truly compose a balanced entrance into the text that respects both the book and its creator.

Cathedral/Grove has almost a “selected poems” feel, in the sense that it offers a wide variety for the reader in form and subject matter (there are even wonderful drawings of fruit and tools to uncover within!) Beginning with a section of lyrics called “Walking the Dog,” paeans to nature and canine companionship, the tone inflected by the pandemic, Glickman’s sonorous, intimate voice is instantly present, generously offering us glimpses of her life, then and now. I loved the anaphoric beat of the eradicating list, “In Quarantine” as it propels us through negation: “no riding the red rooster/ no skating to Antarctica/or along the rings of Saturn,” the emotional sestina about traveling to funerals called “A Mind of Winter,” and the funny trip across the border of “Emporium” where purchases were made of “Bass Weejuns penny loafers, Nancy Drew mysteries/and Clark’s Teaberry gum, five pieces for 7 cents.” I was most entranced by the two segments of the book called “Survival Kit,” both featuring prose pieces in the voices of fruit and vegetables, then a range of tools. Recollecting both Louise Gluck and Lorna Crozier but with more of a quirky wink that Wislawa Szymborska might have employed, these pieces are humorous and moving. My favorites are the “Lettuce” who compares its state of being “mostly water” to that of the human condition and pleads with us to let it “lay my cool wrists on your fevered cheeks” and the “File” who rhapsodizes about being similar to Othello or Hamlet in that “what makes them great is the same quality as what defeats them.”

The eponymous long piece in fragments on the 2019 burning of Notre-Dame de Paris as well as the desecration of the ancient forests on Vancouver Island simply begs to be performed, its italicized repetitions of lines like, “still singing the ancient songs/of praise/and lamentation” increasing in power as the poem unfolds. Glickman doesn’t shrink from dealing with difficult subjects as with other pieces also in the final section, “Chimera,” such as the stunning “Smell of Smoke.” Riffing off the hauntings of Paul Celan its knell of a line: “still fleeing the smell of smoke” concludes all six stanzas. And then, bam, Glickman can suddenly pivot to an ecstatic poem about a cardinal, plumb the reasons why she is re-reading The Illiad or give us tips about living abroad. Only a couple of pieces get a bit too talky for their own good, as with the rambling “The Greenwood,” which possibly strings together a few too many factoids about Robin Hood to be compelling to the ear. Cathedral/Grove is eminently readable though, rarely falling into a dull moment, and underscoring the truth that “when prayer fails,/art will serve.”

Hazard, Home by Christine Lowther (Caitlin Press 2024)

First off, the cover is a gorgeous rendition of an Anna’s Hummingbird by Chris Lowther’s sister, Beth Wilks (each of the five sections commencing- and the collection ending – with another of her exquisite drawings, but in black & white.) And the ancient-forest-friendly cover stock and paper are silky and feel delicious in the hands. I so appreciate a reader-considerate size of text too with nil French sleeves, a book small enough for the pocket and massive enough, musically and conceptually, for many re-reads. Lowther is in a unique position to compose eco-poetry that enters realms many don’t as she lives part of the year on a “floatshack” in Wanačis-Hilthoois Tribal Park and thus has intimate access to many of the species she writes about. We are fortunate readers to glimpse this world. As Sue Sinclair writes in relation to poetry’s role in ecological thinking: “I can’t clearcut an acre of forest in which I recognize its whatness, its radiance. Poetic epiphany….may thus be helpful in redressing some of the ecological imbalances we’re currently living with.” And there are epiphanies galore in Hazard, Home, regarding the inhabitants of the oceans, the night, the air, the trees and within our human interactions with other species. The first part, Waters, begins, in “Floating on the Surface,” with a stirring listing of flotsam and jetsam, such as: “tiny white petals of shore yarrow” or “knotted skull of cedar burl,” beautiful noticings but never from within the innocence or blindness of the traditional nature poem, as we also have the melding of purity and decimation in: “whole white salal flowers, round as styrofoam beads.” The potency is not only in Lowther’s ability to acknowledge that all seeing is problematized by knowledge, but also, that one can still celebrate, as in her honouring depiction of bees that, “cling to anise hyssop towers,/splay communally on meshes of white alyssum,/dangle from blue borage” (It’s a Party), inviting them to stay in her cabin, then joyfully beckoning, “Let everyone come!” as she remembers that she is “their guest.”

The Sounds segment is only four poems but it introduces us to the unique diction Lowther has drawn from Robert McFarlane’s Landmarks book, such as the word for an unidentifiable noise in nature, or “hummadruz.” I only wish these definitions were in a glossary at the end rather than footnotes, a preference that lessens the visual messiness of the page. “The Listening Dark” is my favourite with its aggravating male imperative at the start for the poet to, “Quit writing nature poems” that evolves into the night serving as “counter-argument.” I also adore the “Pop-up Grebe” (who is “gaunt” and “titchy”) and the “‘Common’ Loon” in the Birds part with “surprise on [its] velvet face.” The (Trees) section for me is the weakest, poetically-speaking, likely because the ongoing fight for the forests, its political rhetoric, its more prosy approach, dominates. The subject matter, however, is essential. We need to hear about the tree protectors, the council meetings, the lies of conservation. I wondered at times about the form in a few of them, some so potently tight and others with line breaks jagging randomly, interrupting the flow of poem-absorption. But it’s a real challenge to write pieces that both say vital things and do the aural and visual work as poems and Lowther almost always succeeds. The closing segment, People, reminds us that we are relentlessly negotiating with other creatures for every resource and that they, after all, were there long before us. I loved the faux tourism brochure (Lowther includes quite a few Nuu-chah-nulth words in titles and within poems that my old keyboard unfortunately cannot reproduce!) where readers are informed about respectful ways to enter the wild and the indigenous: “Pick up the beads/and the cigarette butts…Allow yourself to be pierced/ by salmonberry thorns…Try to look through decolonized eyes.” Also the sad nationalistic truths behind the “Canadian Patch Job,” the pandemic realities of momentary animal freedom in “Opportunity” and the tragic helplessness of “We Let This Happen” with its crushing final line: “You must make way for us,/our lights that will erase the stars.” Christine Lowther’s Hazard, Home will stand with the most haunting and necessary books of poems on the plight of our planet: its specific graces, its general desecrations, its “beauty that blindsides them awake.”

Burn Diary by Joshua Chris Bouchard (a Buckrider Book, 2023)

Debut poetry collections, although they are far more sophisticated than they once may have been, still call dibs on raw emotional intensity, an edge their authors may tone down in subsequent books (or not, but usually). It’s your first chance to be (you hope) read on another level and you won’t play it safe (nor should you ever, but). Joshua Chris Bouchard’s Burn Diary manifests such poems, ones that smoke with anger, smoulder with hunger and even flame with what is so much more important than mere content, his ability to hear the music in language and the line. It took me a handful of poems to be drawn into this consistent mood. At first I was hearing statement after statement pieces such as in Jazz where “You tell me how to hurt myself with spoons./You keep bathwater in jars on the porch.” The issue here is with believability. The voicing hadn’t carved itself sufficiently deep enough in my psyche to draw me utterly in. But by the time of Help when suddenly there is more narrative flow in the tightly-coupleted address to the “you” who shows “cancer scars” at a Dairy Queen and leads to assertions of regret that the speaker became the “hipster sellout asshole/we said we’d never be,” I could be wholly present as a reader for the developing tonal web Bouchard weaves through the core of Burn Diary, the title operating both as a directive and an account of trauma.

Frequently only the I and you pronouns are repeated, but in a central piece, Little Lake, characters are sketched: Pierre, Agatha and Jamie, actors in a fragmented Canadian pastoral of “clear-cut stumps…dandelion stem…the cold of crabgrass” where a beaver, humorously, “cleans its ass,” that tee-hee instantly balanced by “a loon” that “washes its dead.” Such human anchors (even if they never re-appear) enable the reader to sink further into the sonority of pain that keeps being pronounced, in later poems like Letters to Lost Children (“My good friend is dead./She took pills and she was old/and had a bad heart”), Stet (“Once I followed the street lines/to the little shores of suck”), as well as perhaps most brutally in the abject When I Walk into an Air-Conditioned Dollarama (“look at how happy I am…before I shove duct tape roll and zip-ties/into my mouth and I choke and vomit”), in Nil by Mouth too (“I try to pick a hair off its tongue. It swallows”) and also in the harsh Pigs where the speaker was “fucked to life” and envisages his father’s cock cut, “shaved like metal” before everyone eats each other.

I feel the ghost of Plath, an undercurrent of Olds, echoes between Burn Diary and Jason Purcell’s The Swollening, where the body erupts in a variety of erotic and repellent ways. Some endings fail their premise as in The Lie which limps away with “I bet my dick on it,” or just simply takes the feeling so far that it becomes a bit of a parody, as when the character is told to “Let the kids sit on your lap and slowly/suffocate with you” (Hot Knives.) One needs to truly be able to envision such violences for them to have an impact and kids sitting and the adverb slowly don’t meld well 😉 Likewise with Dog Dick that bounces between animal phalluses, kings, religion, tomatoes, skyscrapers, coffee. You name it really. It’s too much if one wants to maintain anything other than the reaction WTF to this Boschian mish-mash. However, some of these crude images could be a source for great grindcore songs like When I Get Lonely where the protagonist (who is his own antagonist) shoves “cigarettes/in [his] urethra.” But I still enjoyed the more moving poems the most, such as The Hours Are Beautiful Nests: “Wind , sand and swollen metal scraps./We’ve somehow collected the obvious./My body stands as an open witness.”

The author ends Burn Diary with the line, “Nothing I mourn will be sacred” (Vow), an example of how closure truly matters in poetry. And this is true in his debut, indubitably. But there are many ways to enter mourning and this book holds out the promise that Bouchard has the fierceness to persist in order to find out.

No Town Called We by Nikki Reimer (Talonbooks 2023)

A book of poems sometimes contains particular points of resonance that are so now, not just topical but that ripple-realm of I and another I fusing into a momentary yes of “we,” the too-infrequently invoked subject position pronoun that is at the gut-brain-heart of Nikki Reimer’s new collection/in-terror-gation No Town Called We. That the opening poem contains this line: “I asked the cat what comes next” is pure bonus. The cat in the lap of the present is a suitable collaborator after all. Reimer takes that vital pronoun, we, and never lets up in this four-part textualizing, tossing it within the slashed lines of This is Not my Beautiful Horse (of course a Talking Heads echo), the disruptions of the pandemic, hyper-development in Calgary, the oil lie in Oil and Gas Don’t Love We Back, and the piece that first truly leapt for me, “Regress or be Destroyed,” which pointedly states a truth most of us are unwilling to voice, that we are, in the Canadian poetry universe, forgetting the “we” of creating communities and honouring our elders, not just the first “I” book, the yearned for “I” gold stars. This poem yawps: “where/ we once had a seat at the table of discourse, we no longer know the/terms of reference” (thus the necessity for critical reviewing and intelligent conversing) and then, more painfully, “our poetry elders have begun to die. was this what we/had planned for our one “wild and precious” life? (I’ll break off here to state that although I mostly loathe Oliver’s contrived verse, Reimer, in several pieces in this book, recuperates their potential) “I don’t want this/anxiety of fading influence…I want to sit at the table of the elders, I want to/set a place for communal discourse.” Yes. I slept and woke and wrote after reading these lines: How are we so soon effaced. What is our poetry model now? Emerge young, get an MFA, a first book to much foofarah, rake in the stars, then fail, fall, vanish into teaching, muck about with the plagiarism machine, say whatever, repeat. No. What about those who go on and go deep. Where is their value, their sustaining. We need the foundation. Not a poetry model of consume fast, then die. No Town Called Poetry, indeed.

Poems that provoke one to think, and in rhythmic ways. So necessary. The ability to drop contemporary allusions in like Netflix, plastic strips, Twitter, espresso, etc and it not to be a superficial skimming but core keys to ailments, contradictions, mercies. The plunging acknowledgement that, “True horror lies in having any kind of body at all” (Heart Hunger Made Fashion) or the brute parallelism of, “Yes Climate is to Weather as Sex is to Death” (Is it PTSD or Is It Cake?). Unafeard. The poet’s neighbourhood, Claresholm, makes multiple appearances as the utter local and filters the whole world’s blank angsts too. Grief. Tupperware. The Ukrainian Baba. Cats who are maudlin. Yeats wavers. There are traces of Christakos, McCafferty, Legris. O, this line: “there’s too much poetry inside the brains/of the grieving” (We Miss “Community”). Ugh, yes. Some perhaps are too much sketches towards than fleshings-out. But this happens also in life. As with the final brutal sequence of Mondays in which migraine-times elaborate anxiety, agony (The iLL Symbolic). Having experienced these cortexical-explosions, this series was almost unbearable to read but, with its elisions of grammar, random capitals and discombobulated syntax it deftly weaves Lisa Robertson’s The Weather threads into “The amazing repeated recall” of “Eager polymorphous disorder” or “meteorological listlessness” where from “a childhood marred” we now “attack time.” Reimer is unyielding in taking us to that place where/from which we can ask why is we not, where is we, when will we arrive, wherefore we, what happens when we ween ourselves off we, what ruptures wail.

Cluster Flux by D.S. Stymeist (Frontenac House Poetry, 2023)

I’m writing this review sitting by my back yard fire pit in Edmonton, a locus that seems apropos as a correlative invoker of energies akin to those found in Cluster Flux: procreation, the prehistoric, the dance of eros and the encroachments of death. The stand out sequence in Stymeist’s collection is indubitably the long poem in seven passages called “Mass Transfer.” In fact, I liked it so much that I would purchase this piece on its own as a chapbook, though it also proves an essential counterpoint to the lyrics that intersperse it here too. Echoing the fierce snap of Solie’s spondees in Short Haul Engine and AR Ammons’ hyphenated listings in Garbage, this sequence is a paean to movement in a kind of geographical-machine dream, as the gloriously tragic train scars the once-perambulations of animals, the Indigenous. And ahhhhh a poet with an ear. The fact that this often comes as a revelation is a pointed comment on the prioritization of subject matter over sound in much current poetry. Stymeist’s poem pops with alliterative verbs: “jolt and jive”; “plank and ping,” punches with nouns: “scab-lands, scree and talus.” The engine whips by and “tugging, jerking, we lurch,” later “ramping, whining” through the “novel topography.” All locales meld, from Darjeeling to Las Vegas, meshing “fizzy drinks” and “live chickens” with “statuettes of Buddhas” while we, as humans “streaming” never quite reach the “terminus.”

In another poem in sections, “Midsummer Disjunction,” painful juxtapositions abound, where the early days of the pandemic collide with Crohn’s, the poet’s more regular ailment, then lift into nature’s marred illuminations: the “opportunistic robin,” “pernicious weeds,” and the “growing orange globes” of rapacious pumpkins. Nothing is static or stagnant in these pieces. There is nowhere to hide and that’s as it needs to be when truths require confrontation. Other poems of note are Traces (“my chest fills with night” I appreciate though I would axe “I gasp for air”), Waiting with my Daughter (ooh the words “sympatric”/ “guppy”/”azure” in combo!), Origin Stories in which a “sack of fish” gobbles “every fleeing ghost,” the bawdy Chaucerian romp of Prick Song and the hilarious and well-researched Ode to a Condom that nods to Olds with its “animal spurt” but goes further with Falloppio, Cassanova and Goodyear. Sometimes, Stymeist slumps into endings as in the flat statement of “self and other/globed together” of Dual Core or the unnecessary repetition of always remembering to “feed the dogs” in The Sleeper and what is up with Oblation slapped on the same page as Sea Jelly? But the ear mostly remains alert in the entangled accuracies of Cluster Flux. Hey I even relished the Kandinsky cover (although I’m not a fan of French sleeves). And I was so happy to feel the hand of Heighton too behind this eminently tuned attention of a book.