Reviewed by Louise Carson This was a difficult book to read. Not because the poems are inaccessible, or boring, or ugly, but because they are so sad. It’s a book length elegy for a life, all lives – for life itself. It was exhausting to read. (Or did I bring exhaustion and self-recognition to the…

reviewed by Carole Mertz. Kim Goldberg writes surrealistic poetry that sometimes incorporates formal poetic forms. Many of the 60 poems in this collection use animals or anthropomorphic beings to convey their frequently apocalyptic messages. Shifts from the concrete to the abstract often startle the reader. You will not find cliches in this collection, and should…

Reviewed by Louise Carson. I must have been feeling a bit rebellious the morning I picked up Sue Chenette’s recent collection Clavier, Paris, Alyssum, and, reading out of order (shocking!), began with the central section: Paris. Mainly because I saw it was the shortest of the book’s three sections, a mere thirteen pages. Good, I…

Reviewed by Louise Carson. While Claudia Coutu Radmore may not talk “Of shoes and ships – and sealing wax – of cabbages and kings”, she does, in rabbit, her latest collection of poetry, cover parrots, Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood, Fogo Island, Montreal history in the 1950s, anatomy, geology, folk art – I could go on but…

Reviewed by Clayton Longstaff two women together alone in the luminous house When you look out your window, what do you see? Are there trees? (how many?) Birds? (ever-fretting pigeons, circling the feet of passing pedestrians? Or are they predatory where you live—a turkey-vulture, perhaps, solitary, perched on some naked branch, craning his neck to…

Reviewed by Louise Carson. It was with a sinking feeling in my gut that I started to read Daniela Elza’s the broken boat. Oh no. The end of a marriage. The loss of a husband, intimacy. The breaking of something that the poet had thought would last forever. My own thirty-five year old trauma began…

Reviewed by Louise Carson   Geography. Do we want poems of a geographical nature? Sure we do, especially in Canada, where we grapple with so much of the stuff. And I love geography. One of my fondest memories is of the whole of my Grade 4 class, under the benign dictatorship of Mrs. Rhodes, mixing…

Reviewed by Susan McMaster May 2020 Anna Yin’s new book of poetry has exactly five English words on the cover – her name, the title, Love’s Lighthouse, and the ISBN if you count that as a word. It is, however, covered in Chinese characters in red and black placed in both vertical and horizontal columns,…

Reviewed by Cynthia Coristine Poetry is the voice of the human soul, speaking across time and distance – Stephen Morrissey  In A Poet’s Journey Montreal native Stephen Morrissey shares four decades of insight about what it means to be a poet and the process by which a poet can discover his “authentic voice”.  The book…

University of Alberta Press | 2018 | 136 Page | $19.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Jenny Haysom Reviewing the Shortlist is a weekly series in which poets shortlisted for our 2019 Book Awards review books written by their peers. Join us for this series until the award winners are announced on June 8, 2019! In this week’s installment,…