>>From Arc Poetry Magazine, Chris Doda reviews Steven Heighton’s The Waking Comes Late (shortlisted for the 2017 Raymond Souster Award)

House of Anansi Press | $19.95 | 128 pages | purchase online

In the­se excel­lent poems, Heighton shows how tech­ni­cal mas­tery can merge with acute­ly rel­e­vant sub­ject mat­ter to great effect. In fact, when it comes to lan­guage, Heighton is a remark­ably effi­cient poet: I rarely find, as I often do when read­ing Cana­di­an poet­ry, myself men­tal­ly edit­ing as I go along. Words here are too pre­cious to be left out of place, whether his own or those of oth­ers.

The most salient feature of The Waking Comes Late is actually that Heighton’s translations—approximations he calls them—are spread throughout the book. His previous two collections featured separate sections of translations, ghettoizing them as it were and, I suspect, inadvertently inviting readers to ignore them. Here, ten translations from various Europeans—and Heighton should be praised for being one of the few Canadian poets who embraces translation as a regular part of his creative process—are woven throughout the book. This gives the collection a more organic feel, especially when one of his poems directly interacts with a translation, such as when a version of Georg Trakl’s “An End” leads to a poem about a Trakl suicide attempt, or when a translation of Anna Akhmatova’s “Lot’s Wife” gives rise to Heighton’s thoughts on Lot himself.