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Harbour Publishing - November 16, 2007 - 0 Comments

One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems by Earle Birney

Reviewed by Rob Taylor

“People who just want to enjoy what follows should skip this preface,” opened Earle Birney in the introduction to his 1977 Ghost in the Wheels: Selected Poems. It is a preface reused in his newest, posthumous Selected, One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems, and it seems, likewise, an appropriate opening to any review of that book. If you have read a good deal of Birney’s work in the past, this new offering will provide you with little more (the vast majority of the collection being a reprinting of Birney’s 1977 Selected).  If you have not read much Birney, for goodness sake, you had better be getting on with it, and One Muddy Hand, being the only Birney collection in print, seems like a good place to start.

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Harbour Publishing - June 27, 2006 - 1 Comment

The Village of Sliding Time by David Zieroth

Reviewed by Rob Taylor

Your teenaged self arrives at your door one morning. Like in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the boy has come to guide you on a journey through your past, yes, but this is somehow different. The boy is as amazed by the present as he is knowing of the past. It is the path the speaker travels with this, his younger self, that is the narrative of David Zieroth’s engaging long poem The Village of Sliding Time.

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