These poems are not about Lady Godiva’s ride, but rather about those who lived, or live, in Coventry. The poems are like the voices heard by someone standing on a street corner, i.e. snatched conversations or brief comments, often inward-looking, more frequently casual but insightful interchanges.

What would become of our poetic heritage without the spectre of madness? Most of it would dissolve like stardust into the atmosphere. One never tires of exploring the theme of sanity’s tenuous threads and putting words together like a jigsaw puzzle, as if we could possibly complete and contemplate the mirror of our interior mysteries.

We all want to be historyless
if that’s not how we say it to ourselves;
nothing we say can touch the forest pond’s
shining, wet edges, mare’s tails,
water lilies, water hyacinths
building energy, black oozy shore.
(“Bushed” 13)

The cover image, all brilliant primary colours and gouts of flame, features a dragster doing a fire burnout. The poems within are gorgeous, deceptively simple homages to the natural world. Seemingly contradicting itself at the outset, John Donlan’s Spirit Engine is a nuanced collection of poems that offers up a wealth of layers to the reader willing to return to it over and over again.

This book made me feel nostalgic. M. Travis Lane lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, a place I lived for ten years and a place I still imagine myself moving back to settle some day. The selection of poems in this volume frequently are about landmarks familiar to me, but the aspect I admire most about this selection is the sheer range of Lane’s imagination. As Lynes points out in her introduction, Lane is not a poet who adheres to certain themes and writes them to death; instead, Lane does have a few preoccupations, but her imagination is certainly not limited by them.

It was the title that grabbed me, and as for why, I cannot exactly say. The Mechanical Bird evoked images of a dusty antique toy store or of Ray Bradbury’s machineries. I let myself be led by this random curiousity, into the mechanics of Asa Boxer’s imagination.

Call for writing about Michael Jackson:

The Meaning of Michael Jackson
MJ Tribute Anthology
literary. thoughtful. intelligent.

Deadline
August 29, 2009 preferred
Sept 4 absolute cut off

Editor Lorette C. Luzajic
http://www.thegirlcanwrite.net

Madeline Sonik’s 2008 collection Stone Sightings is a lovely read. Although similar themes of love, displacement and outsiderness, as well as images from nature and mythology are present in each piece, there are no official sections or separations between groups of poems on different topics. However, the book can be roughly broken into three sections. Unofficially, the first third of the book deals with home, family and the day-to-day. The second has more to do with people, both real and mythological. The last section is less unified, but has much to do with place, both specific and general, physical and epistemological. Across each of these broad themes there are fantastic moments in which Sonik allows the reader entry into her particular, sad and beautiful world.

McLeod uses the phrasing and cadence of his Cree people. The language resonates with the long history of the culture and deprivations of Canada’s First Nations. He brings together the watershed experience of Batoche, the courage of his grandfather Gabriel on Juno Beach, and his own growth through alcoholic addiction to find himself a mature adult.

BookCamp Vancouver 2009 Unconference: Exploring New Ideas in Books, Publishing and the Future of Reading will be taking place on Friday October 16th at Simon Fraser Harbour Centre campus in downtown Vancouver.

The Writers Guild of Alberta presents inkPulse, a new day camp for young writers, aged 12-18, wishing to explore their creative potential. We tap into your imagination through creation, collaboration and diversity!

“I go back and I go back, autumns after summers, a hundred walks arcing. I walk up and down, planting nothing. I lie in my tent at night, listening for ghosts. What little they say I write down” (13). This is where Barbara Klar’s Cypress begins; it is a strong start to a strong third collection. This Foreword, or Forward as Klar calls it, is a slim homage to the ghosts that walk the landscape of her latest book.

A product of Montreal’s vibrant literary community, Gillian Sze’s first published collection of poetry, Fish Bones, is a strong and assured contribution to the Canadian poetry scene and identifies Sze as a poet to watch in the future. Acknowledging a dynamic relationship with the visual art-object and having as its central conceit a random stroll through a museum, the ekphrastic verse of Fish Bones occupies the fraught space between artistic pursuit and life, and it is a sophisticated exploration of the power of the aesthetic and the erotic to re-imagine the self.

A clever web application for recommending books. Looks like it pulls its results from Amazon and LibraryThing. Check out The Book Seer.

Who are you, the reader? Who am I, the writer? How do we interact and connect? These are the questions that Hyland explores in this collection of poetry. The relationship is abstract and distant, and Hyland probes that distance and abstraction with precision. No solution is possible and he gives none, expending his expertise on close scrutiny.

Sorry to see this in my inbox today: An open letter from Gary Dunfield and Andrew Steeves, co-owners of Gaspereau Press, announcing staff and publication reductions.

Sheri Benning’s 2007 collection Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books) contains some hauntingly beautiful language. Most of the poems take place in her home of Saskatchewan, a province I have visited for only the briefest time. Her ability to use sensory details to take me there with her is laudable. I should admit that, generally, my favourite poems have little to do with nature and more to do with people, but due to her lovely and lyrical language, I was captivated from very early on.

A fun new contest from Biblioasis and Seen Reading:

Do you bear the scars of CanLit’s internecine wars? Have you spent a small fortune on postage and only have a drawerful of rejection slips to show for it? Has the world been slow to recognize your evident talent? Then, dear reader, this contest is for you.

Readernaut is another social networking site for book lovers. There’s not much info on the site at the moment, as it’s still in Beta, but it looks like you can share what you’re reading (or have read) by “writing notes, tracking progress, and engaging in meaningful discussions with friends.”

When I switched the site to the new content management system last month, I had to update the address of the RSS feed. Please re-subscribe if you haven’t already so you can catch all the latest reviews and news items.

Murder is horrifying. And the serial murders of a specific demographic of vulnerable people—like aboriginal women living in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood and making a living from dangerous and stigmatized work—is even more so. And when those murders happen in your community, it’s heart wrenching.