Lady Godiva and Me by Liam Guilar

Reviewed by Joanna M. Weston 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...

Penny Dreadful by Shannon Stewart

Reviewed by Michelle Miller 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...

Jaguar Rain The Margaret Mee Poems by Jan Conn

Jaguar Rain: The Margaret Mee Poems by Jan Conn

By Skoopchap
Review by Jenna Butler. Jaguar Rain: The Margaret Mee Poems is a sensual feast for the image-starved reader. Poet Jan Conn realizes the lush landscape of Brazil in vivid detail through the eyes of artist Margaret Mee, imbuing the poems with a vivid tapestry of scent, sound and colour. At the same time, Conn’s work is subtly underwritten by an awareness of the volatile nature of the landscape and of the painter/poet’s place in it. Conn gives the reader no preamble; the leap into the Brazilian landscape is immediate and alienating, much as Mee found her initial forays into the forest to be. Not only are the surroundings quite different from anything the speaker in the poems has encountered before,
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Worthy of His Fall by Richard Harrison

By Skoopchap
Like the kukri knife that adorns its cover, the poems of Worthy of His Fall by Richard Harrison are keen, precise, and dangerous.  His political poems are not meant to be, nor are they, beautiful: “This is a political poem, so / don’t expect beauty” (“Warnography” 1-2).  Unfortunately, the political poems make unwieldy weapons.  They entrench themselves in the language of the war on terror, name-dropping Bush and Rumsfeld, bin Laden and Hussein.  The language, to use Di Brandt’s words (from the back cover) to refute her own comments, is “militant patriarchal monotheism.” The speaker attempts to reconcile modern ideas of fatherhood with what he learned from his own father.  In “Song for the Lesser Giant,” he quotes his daughter singing “a song of all things
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Creamsicle Stick Shivs by John Stiles

Creamsicle Stick Shivs by John Stiles

By Skoopchap
Review by Greg Santos John Stiles’ second collection of poetry, Creamsicle Stick Shivs, is an enjoyable read particularly due to Stiles’ delight in language, humour, and unique observations. Split up into three sections, the book chronicles the poet’s movements from Canada’s east coast to Toronto and finally England. The first section is the most linguistically interesting of the book. Stiles uses colloquial dialect from Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley to great effect, bringing characters to life in brief pieces that sparkle with energy. Take for instance these lines from “Halifax Snowstorm”: Well, it’s true: I do stand like a soldier in the parking lot with yer grocery bags. But Jesus girl, wouldja take off yer goddamned top en let that stunning
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Airstream Land Yacht by Ken Babstock

Airstream Land Yacht by Ken Babstock

By Skoopchap
Review by Jenn Houle. I think it might be best to read Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht in the morning. I made the mistake of first cracking it in the evening, and I ended up unable to sleep. Could be that it was the seasons changing, my circadian rhythms glitching with late spring dampness and fog, but I am nearly certain Babstock’s poems played a part. Some of the poems in this collection are just so surprisingly beautiful, so stunning and viscerally interesting, that it actually takes your brain a little while to apprehend it. Something like when you have a near collision in the car, and the details of the near-miss only fill themselves in later, once you’re already
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The Village of Sliding Time by David Zieroth

The Village of Sliding Time by David Zieroth

By Skoopchap
Review 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. Zieroth, the former editor of Event Magazine, was raised in rural Manitoba, and currently resides in North Vancouver. It is within these two locales that Zieroth fixes his story, as they are the landscapes of his past and his present.
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Faulty Lines: The Poetry and Poetics of Don McKay

By Skoopchap
Reviewed by Zachariah Wells Camber: Selected Poems 1983-2000, by Don McKay, McLelland & Stewart, 2004. 224 pp. Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay, by Don McKay, ed. and intro. Méira Cook, afterword Don McKay. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2006. 86 pp. Strike/Slip, by Don McKay, McLelland & Stewart, 2006. 88 pp. With the publication of a Selected in 2004, an essay collection in 2005, a new collection and a short critical selection in 2006, as well as an anthology of essays on his work forthcoming this year, the time is ripe for a sober appraisal of Don McKay’s merits and flaws as a poet. I say “sober” deliberately, as most of what passes for criticism of McKay’s work sounds to
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Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

By Skoopchap
Review by Stephen Morrissey. Leonard Cohen has excelled at all of his creative endeavours, as a poet, a novelist, and as a songwriter. Whether he is compared to his singer-songwriter contemporaries Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, or compared to Margaret Atwood—the only Canadian literary contemporary equal to Cohen in terms of fame—he is among the most creative and accomplished writers Canada has produced. Cohen’s Book of Longing is made up of poems written over the last thirty years and includes on almost every page original drawings that he made of himself and other subjects. Book of Longing is not a major book in Leonard Cohen’s body of work. Some of the poems are very good, but it is mostly a
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Where Sound Pools by Lynn Davies

Where Sound Pools by Lynn Davies

By Skoopchap
Review by Ian LeTourneau. Lynn Davies’ first collection, The Bridge that Carries the Road, published in 1999, was nominated for the Governor General’s and Gerald Lampert Awards. Where Sound Pools, her second book, equally deserves prize nominations. On the surface, the poems seem straightforward: lyrical with some narrative excursions. But don’t be fooled. They contain more depth than Jules Vernes’ 20,000 leagues. Davies’ poems are distinguished by the dexterity and playfulness of her tones and metaphors. In poem after poem, Davies’ powerful imagination produces arrestingly fresh metaphors which are not only apt, but are whimsical, adding some much appreciated, oft-neglected humour to Canadian literature. Take these few examples of Davies at her whimsical best: at a music recital, we glimpse
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