Reviewed by Stephen Morrissey ineffable, The Mystical Poems by Edwin Varney (The Poem Factory, Courtenay, BC, 2022). 14 pages. ISBN: 978-1-895593-57-0 Back in 1977, I reviewed Edwin Varney’s Human Nature (1974), published in CV II (Vol. 3, no. 2); it was my first published book review.  And here I am, so many years later, reviewing Edwin Varney’s new…

Reviewed by Louise Carson somewhere still in wind the tree is bending Silver Bow Publishing, 201882 pages, $20.00ISBN: 9781927616758 The tree is on the front cover, a weathered and twisted bonsai-shaped thing, growing out of rock. The title slows me right down; is why I chose to review the book. And you know, at this…

Reviewed by Louise Carson Hell-BoxFrog Hollow Press, 202025 pagesISBN: 9781926948997 As the first note at the end of this chapbook explains, “A hell-box is a receptacle for damaged or discarded type.” As a title for anything, Hell-Box rocks. And it hints that the contents will be wildly assorted. They are. But the voice of Peter…

Reviewed by Louise Carson The Negation of Chronology: Imagining Geraldine Moodie, Rebecca Luce-Kapler (Inanna, 2020).     I knew after I’d read the forward, that I’d be interested in the material covered by Rebecca Luce-Kapler in The Negation of Chronology. I’d just finished reading Molly Peacock’s Flower Diary, a biography of American/Canadian painter Mary Hiester Reid…

Reviewed by Michael Edwards Rags of Night in Our Mouths by Margo Wheaton (MQUP, 2022) I. Margo Wheaton’s second poetry collection, Rags of Night in Our Mouths, takes the form of a place-based memoir, presented in three ghazal sequences. In what the book’s jacket describes as a “Maritime gothic,” the work is set in areas…

Reviewed by Dawn MacDonald Arborophobia by Nancy Holmes (University of Alberta Press, 2022) “Pray inwardly,” the 15th-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich once advised, “even if you do not enjoy it. It does good, though you feel nothing.” “Read poetry,” one might respond, “even if you do not understand it. It does good, though you…

Reviewed by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews Poetry, azure coloured glass of a sunlit window, encases celestine light on the glossy cover of this book, softening the view of reality’s stark terrain. An aperture over a land mass in the middle of the deepest, dark ocean, soon shattered in the inset cover image, by the blow of…