2007 | Reviews of Canadian Poetry Books and Chapbooks

One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems by Earle Birney

By Skoopchap November 17, 2007January 31, 2024

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 Canadian 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

Keep PoetryReviews.ca Alive

By Skoopchap November 13, 2007January 10, 2019

Ok, it’s been almost a month since the last review, and that’s way too long. It’s certainly not for a lack of reviews to post or books to review: I’ve got about 20 reviews that need positing and at least 80 books that could be sent out for review. The problem is time. I’m a one-person operation, and my business and family take precedence over this site. Having said that, I don’t just want to let PoetryReviews.ca fade away into nothing. It’s become an excellent resource and remains the only site dedicated solely to Canadian poetry reviews. So, it’s probably time for me to either give the site up or look for a partner who’d be willing to take on

Commute Poems by Jesse Ferguson

By Skoopchap October 17, 2007January 31, 2024

Review by Joanna M. Weston about the best Canadian poetry. From the content of Ferguson’s poems and at the same time the best poems of all time, it is unclear which meaning of ‘commute’ he intends: to reduce a prison sentence; to make substitution; or to travel regularly over some distance to work. There is real promise in his flights of language and his obvious love of words in this unpaginated chapbook of eleven poems. Unfortunately he falls into the trap of playing word games, as in ‘Lichen’: Like Unto Mar Bull Marble Masticator Master Cater His love of word-games leads him to use alliteration too frequently as in ‘A Vindication of the Flights of Seagulls’: …the blanched bone updrafts

One Stone by Barbara Pelman

By Skoopchap August 27, 2007January 31, 2024

Poetry Review by Jenna Butler. Barbara Pelman’s One Stone speaks quietly and eloquently of rebirth following the loss of a twenty-year marriage. At times wry, but never bitter, Pelman charts the circular course of love and loss using her family’s history as a touchstone. What thrills me about this book is its quietude: the manner in which it delves deep without trumpeting about the journey; the way in which its quiet words reach a common ground in every reader. Pelman does not wax romantic about the breakdown of her marriage; as she says in “Journey,” “never mind the goodbyes / Close the door and go” (15). The shattering of the marriage that grounds this collection is not an unexpected one.

The Meaning of Michael Jackson

By Skoopchap August 21, 2007January 31, 2024

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 Eulogies, poems, short stories, theories, thoughtful inquiries, what Michael Jackson meant to you, essays. No dead pedophile jokes. I don’t shy away from difficult subjects but I expect intelligent inquiry and reflection. Michael’s music, legend, symbolism, spirituality, cultural significance, psychology, history and more. Or even games inspired by him or featuring his music, just like Elk Studios’ slot machine games, anyone can find and play on many online casino sites. Be creative. Be emotional. Be smart. What does MJ’s fame say about our culture? Why was he the one? Why did society turn on him, and then turn right back at death? What does fame do to a person? How does celebrity serve us…

Every Inadequate Name by Nick Thran

By Skoopchap July 16, 2007January 31, 2024

Reviewed by Alessandro Porco In his debut collection of poetry, Every Inadequate Name, Nick Thran’s is at its best when his poem’s speaker’s emotional transparency is honest enough to admit complicity; he’s flawed and guilty, young and frivolous — that is to say, too human for living yet just perfect for poetry. Conversely, the collection is at its worst when the poem’s speaker participates only in his capacity as a moralizing spectator, resulting in off-putting poems quietly dictated from the sidelines. Perhaps these are the inevitable two faces of a romantic like Thran. Where one goes, the other follows. Surely, there are other poems that fall somewhere in between, but they are for some other review to take up and

Unsettled by Zachariah Wells

By Skoopchap July 3, 2007January 10, 2019

“Not since Al Purdy’s North of Summerhas a Canadian poet written so compellingly about life in the frozen arctic,” opens the back-cover blurb of Vancouver-via-Baffin Island-via-PEI poet Zachariah Wells’ first collection, Unsettled. The similarities between Purdy’s book and Wells’ — a collection of poems written during Wells’ time working as an airline freight handler on Baffin and Cornwallis Islands — are found both in their subject matter and styles. The poems in the two collections explore the authors’ sense of self as grounded in (and out of) place – writers utilizing a foreign land to unlock once-foreign parts of themselves. Likewise, stylistically, it would not take much to convince me that lines such as “Tirelessness, sleeplessness, endless darkness, endless / light, boxes,

I Cut My Finger by Stuart Ross

By Skoopchap June 1, 2007January 31, 2024

Review by Nick Thran The 2003 publication of Stuart Ross’ Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New and Selected was met with the sort of mixed reception one would expect from such an alchemical poet. One had the sense that, while admiring his achievement, reviewers still refused to see him as more than a sort of eccentric uncle of the Can-Lit scene — a little too earnest for the staunchly avant-garde, a little too wacky for the more traditional camps. In the four years since Hey, Crumbling Balcony! and this year’s recently published I Cut My Finger, Stuart Ross’ influence has been felt more than ever. Younger poets in Canada publishing books of a decidedly surrealist nature (Kevin Connolly’s drift, Jason Heroux’s

Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method by Daniel Scott Tysdal

By Skoopchap May 24, 2007January 31, 2024

Review by Maria Scala. In reviewing Daniel Scott Tysdal’s Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method, many words come to mind, foremost of these are playful and innovative. Even before I read a single poem, the books slick red cover, the title emblazoned across the front in uppercase, its unusual trim size (8 1/2 x 11 ), and its page after page of carefully formatted text and images, promised not your average book of poetry. And not your average editor George Elliot Clarke worked on the book with Tysdal. Clarke was on the jury that awarded Tysdal the John V. Hicks Manuscript prize from the Saskatchewan Writers Guild in 2004. After publication in 2006, Tysdal went

Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier edited by Catherine Hunter

By Skoopchap May 19, 2007January 10, 2019

Lorna Crozier is a knowledgeable poet and a worthy matriarch for Canadian poetry. Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier is a part of a new wise series of texts from Wilfrid Laurier University Press that strive to bring Canadian poets to a larger audience. Without pretence and with an eye to producing the effect of improvisation, these collections come selected and introduced by a critic with an afterword from the poet represented. This project is one of the most exciting, cooperative, communal and familial endeavours that I have seen coming out of the poetry establishment in the past few years and all of my praise goes out to Wilfrid Laurier Press for their efforts. The poems of Lorna Crozier