Eclectic Reader – Page 2 – Kathryn MacDonald

What I’m reading – Hunger: The Poetry of Susan Musgrave selected by Micheline Maylor

Her dress is the colour of soft butter. / Her hunger tastes of whiskey and rain. (“Hunger”)

Back in the 1970s when I was at university, few female poets were invited for readings – poetry was a man’s game – and Susan Musgrave is the only woman that I recall reading at the university during that decade. I was hooked. During that time, I collected three poetry books and one novel, each autographed by Susan, along with a postcard note. (In another book, I found a slender feather used as a page marker.) To this small group of her early work, I’ve now added, Hunger: The Poetry of Susan Musgrave selected with an introduction by Micheline Maylor.

In the introduction, Micheline Maylor writes that Susan Musgrave’s “poetry is personal, intimate, confessional, esoteric, and infused with sadness…(xiii). Further along, Maylor writes: “Her impeccable use of grammar is that kind that causes poets a sort of aesthetic arrest. I could write an essay on the grammar in her poem ‘Tenderness’ from Exculpatory Lilies. The use of colons and question marks as midline-forced full stops gave me a new standard for structural parallelism and a kind of a craft that is a master class of internal enjambment and pacing at line level” (xx). ‘Tenderness’ is included in the collection as is an afterward by Susan Musgrave.

Each poem takes my breath away and I’m finding new favourite passages – “Lately I have come to believe / all that is of value is the currency / of the heart…” (“Origami Dove,” 27); “wild and alone is the way to live” (“Wild and Alone,” 47) in which she learns a life lesson from a mouse – besides the sadness, you will also find a little subtle humour (or so I’m reading it that way today). Like Musgrave’s Granny, brew a pot of strong tea and enjoy.

The Impstone by Susan Musgrave (McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1976)

Selected Strawberries and Other Poems by Susan Musgrave (Sono Nis Press, 1977)

A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury (McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1979)

The Charcoal Burners: a novel (McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1980)

Hunger: The Poetry of Susan Musgrave selected by Micheline Maylor (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025)

Only five of the 35 books by Susan Musgrave. Wow!

What I’m Reading: and the river, too: Pictures and Poems of the South Shore

Photography by Marty Gervais, Poetry by Kim Fahner, Peter Hrastovec, John B. Lee, Micheline Maylor, Teajai Travis (Black Moss Press, 2025)

Like Windsor, the photographs in and the river, too are gritty, bold, beautiful; each is a story; each is a poem. Music overflows the poetry – perfect since we grew up on Motown, on the jazz that crossed the river, on our own homegrown – and each poem also suggests the grit and sensuous experiences that connect the poets to the place.

Some of my favourite lines include:

“I am a crow, caught on lift of current, restless and open.” (“Migration Patterns,” Kim Fahner)

“…but the guy-wires of the bridge
appear strung in pairs
like piano wires / carrying the music of the wind”
(“The Gordie Howe International Bridge,” John B. Lee)

“A smooth descent down a fretless spin.” (“Honey Suckle Steel Beneath a Blue Sun (Jazz)” Teajai Travis)

“Here in the alley,” a phrase repeated, beginning four of the seven stanzas, creating music and echoes (“Here in the Alley, Peter Hrastovec)

“I’m made from rivermud, muck-sludge with scrap metal,
truck traffic, human traffic, tunnel traffic, bridge traffic
Georgian buildings turned to falafel shops. A wreckage
[…]
(“Ground Zero: Ouellette and Riverside,” Micheline Maylor — I love the rush of it, the music of it, the truth of it)

What I’m reading: The Moon that Turns You Back by Hala Alyan

The Moon that Turns You Back by Hala Alyan “blurs boundaries and borders between place, time, and poetic form” (cover copy). The poems are beautifully rendered and pulse with emotion; they look inside and out into the world. This poem, “Half-Life in Exile” is representative of a major theme in the collection, but the form and structure of the poems varies from rather traditional to experimental. I’m loving the read.

The Moon that Turns You Back by Hala Alyan (Ecco, 2024)

Other reviews under the “witness” umbrella that may interest you include:

Almond Blossoms & Beyond by Mahmoud Darwish, trans. by Mohammad Shaheen (here)

Songs of Exile by Bänoo Zan (here)

Alien Correspondents by Antony Di Nardo (here)

[…] by Fady Joudah (here)

A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk (here)

from Sarajevo with Sorrow by Goran Simić, translated by Amela Simić (here)

Poetry is Blood by Keith Garebian (here)

The Sleep Orchard: A Response to Arshile Gorky by Amy Dennis (here)

Review of Hollay Ghadery’s Rebellion Box

Perhaps one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the cover of Rebellion Box is revealing. The illustration is dominated by a housedress trimmed in pink upon a paint-peeling background exposing an opaque scene that leads the eye to another and another. This, in a way, is what the poems do in Ghadery’s debut collection.

Opening to the first poem, “Postcard, Santa Maria,” we meet a girl, sensuous beside a pool, but then, a disclaimer: “I’m not that girl / anymore.” This, followed by the surprise “the cervix / of a fifteen-year-old, / my doctor says. / Not bad / for four kids” (1-2). And so, we are introduced to the speaker of many of the poems that follow, and a dominant theme of the collection is identified. Who is this woman who once lay by a pool in sunshine, who is a mother, who we will learn is biracial and bicultural, who attends historical talks, who writes poetry “to get [her] thoughts straight,” as suggested in an article Ghadery published in The New Quarterly.

In that article, Ghadery refers specifically to the title poem (45-46), a sestina, in which form controls and shapes the poem – a box as it were, for sharing the 1837 love story of Joseph, prisoner of the rebellion, and his love, Mary. The form disciplines Ghadery, allowing her to reveal the “mores and values” of the time in a tight, coherent way. Those mores and values are a constraint for the protagonist who cannot approach Mary directly, and I wonder, as I read through the collection time and again, if the Rebellion Box hasn’t become a metaphor for the constraints experienced by the poet herself.

To read the entire review that is published by FreeFall Magazine, please click here.

What I’m reading: Almond Blossoms & Beyond by Mahmoud Darwish, trans. by Mohammad Shaheen

Early in his long poetic career, Mahmoud Darwish became known as “the poet” of Palestine. Each time I read through Almond Blossoms and Beyond, I become more aware of how deeply tied the words he chooses are to the metaphors and symbolism of Palestine and Palestinians.

One of my favourite poems in the collection is “To Describe an Almond Blossom.” It begins: “To describe an almond blossom no encyclopedia of flowers / is any help to me, no dictionary. / Words carry me off to snares of rhetoric / that wound the sense, and praise the wound they’ve made.” He searches. He questions. He writes: “Neither homeland nor exile are words, / but passions of whiteness in a / description of the almond blossom.” He concludes the poem without having written the national anthem that he set out to write in the 1960s. Palestine is not yet free.

The almond blossom – metaphor of resilience and hope – is a presence in the collection, along with many other symbols: horseman and gazelle, pomegranate blossoms, the olive, bridge, moth, and that is the beginning. These metaphors and symbols are easy to research and doing so will deepen your understanding of place (Palestine) and the loss of place, the anguish of exile.

In reading and rereading the collection, I experience the poems as witness to the diaspora that began in 1948, and of the agony of exile. “Exile” is the title of half the eight sections that structure the book (Exile V to Exile VIII). Each is a long poem occupying pages 49-95. (In a review I wrote on my blog on February 10, 2020, I quoted Carolyn Forché’s definition of witness poetry. You can find it here.)

The poems in Almond Blossoms & Beyond are among the last poems Darwish wrote, and they overflow with the fullness of his passion and the skill of his years.

*Almond Blossoms & Beyond* by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), translated by Mohammad Shaheen (Interlink Books 2024; first published in Arabic in 2009)

What I’m Reading:

No wonder the land is so rich / Blood is the best water
(“Battle of Books”).

Songs of Exile by Bänoo Zan (Guernica Editions, 2016)

Last fall, I met Bänoo Zan at the Northumberland Festival of the Arts literary event where she read. What a pleasure! I purchased a copy of Songs of Exile and have enjoyed (maybe not the best word for a book that unsettles) many read-throughs. Since then, Bänoo has received The Writers’ Union of Canada’s 2025 Freedom to Read Award. If you haven’t read Songs of Exile, My Father, or any of her other published work, I suggest you visit your library or bookstore. Bänoo Zan writes with passion, insight, and skill.

BOOK REVIEW: In a Tension of Leaves and Binding by Renée M. Sgroi

(Guernica Editions, 2024, 121 pages)

…

observe the body

as it worms between leaves, squeezes into folio, witness to textured
weave, to signatures bound in faux leather, in paperback, translations
between rows of beans, pods of verbal clauses dangling from stems
while fields lie fallow, forests burn perforated pages where words,
who paragraphs steak justified in columns, sliced cubes of letters
under crumble of Pink Pearl erasers as the system of nature,
like absented rivers, flows unmarked in the margins
(“systema,” 11)

In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is Renée M. Sgroi’s second poetry collection. With its varied forms (traditional and experimental) and play of voices (the poet’s and those of plants and animals) we enter a world both multilayered and accessible. Beautifully conceived and delivered, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding delights and intrigues.

Grounded in the garden, the poems are dirt under the fingernails, both real and metaphor. Reading In a Tension… we learn about the inhabitants of, and visitors to, the garden. We sense grief. And we learn about the gardener – her intense stare, touch, involvement – her leap into “other.”

To distinguish the voices of poet from “other,” Sgroi shifts margins. The poems on the left margin are in the poet’s voice. Others, she tells us are “centred in the middle of the page, a sign that the imagined voice of the onion, the carrot, the grasshopper is bounded by the margins of what is knowable and what is not” (“In other words, two,” 113).

She also plays with form in other ways. For example, the words in “Morphology” box a rectangle, a garden. Words in the seven “visitations” poems are scattered across the pages like birds visiting a feeder. Sgroi experiments with form in still other ways. In “MIXED METHODS EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF ACER SACCHARUM IN SITU, WITH PROGNOSIS BY ARBORISTS AND LINGUISTS ON THE FUTURE OF INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION: AN INVESTIGATION” (45-49) Sgroi’s form mimics a research paper under the headings of abstract through conclusions.

Some poems reveal, some stir questions like riddles in a caldron. Some poems, like the titular poem connect us – mothers and daughters – to trees and leaves:

…

sweetness is the sound a pen makes
or a spine’s crack when first opened

as a birth canal binds daughter, mother
into a book of doubled pages

and into the sweep a willow branch extends
low beside the river,

and snaps

in a tension of leaves and binding,”
… (50).

Please read the remainder of the review in The Temz Review.

Review of Erina Harris’ “Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead”

This review has been published by FreeFall Magazine (December 2024)

Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead
by Erina Harris
Wolsak & Wynn (2024)

Academic and poet, Erina Harris, has several interests and concerns, many find their way into the subjects and themes of her second poetry collection, Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead.

According to Harris’ profile on the University of Alberta website, where she teaches, her research interests include fairy tales, rhyme and nonsense verse, gender and women’s writing, subjectivity and relationality, experimentalism and more. Given this array, Harris meets the organizational challenge of creating a cohesive collection by structuring the poems into an abecedarium. But the complex weaving of varied subjects and themes into a whole is not the only thing that readers will notice. As in her first book, The Stag Head Spoke, the poetry here is highly original and experimental.

Readers are treated to rhyme and nonsense verse, word-play and music, a taste of Dadaism and Surrealism among other isms. The poems are subversive. They inform, create context for her research interests, while shifting perspective in unusual ways. They play with form, structure, ideas – and in the case of “Letter B: Bestiary Rondo” with sound.

… in the breath, in the breeze, that the breathing beasts
breathe in, the breaths of the bees breathing trees’ breaths, the
breeze breathes the bee-breaths with trees breathing beast-
breaths, breath breezes in beast-breathing bees breathe the
bee-breath-ing trees in the breath-tree will be in the breeze of
the bee in the tree-bees will breathe with breeze-breaths will
beasts bleed …

[Da Capo] (3)

Harris is a skillful weaver of words.

…

Please go to FreeFall‘s website by clicking on this link to read the rest of the review.

WHAT I’M READING: The King of Terrors by Jim Johnstone

Last night the lake rose to meet me as I crossed. “Future Ghost” (13)

Writing “in time” with a brain tumour diagnosis is an amazing feat that Jim Johnstone does with honesty and grace. I offer a small look at the beauty and tone he achieves while writing through uncertainty.

Who can say why specific poems speak louder, but five seem to always surface with each reading, always curled up in a big old armchair – somehow comforting. Of the five, “Kracken” (43) rises to the top:

KRAKEN

Slip of the tongue, slip of the sea’s
eight arms, and the whirlpool begins
to compress its armour;
failed spears, failed reel, a lens
to enlarge the pericardial inferno
threshing like an ocean

…

the wine-dark whine of the unseen.

The others among my favourites to reread over and over again include: “Invitation (Set to Summer Radio)” (53), “Three Sons” (56-57), and “Slice-Selective Excitation (Brain Scans 1-5)” (63).

The final poem “This is the End” (89-95) haunts with insight and intensity. These lines from the middle speak to the fear: “The future is as uncertain // as the body // it inhabits / and multiplies rapidly” (93).

Near the poem’s end: “The future // (heart) // heath // hearth // is coming // When it climbs through / an open window // we’ll know // it’s the end. / Ghost orchid, clover, crab- // grass grown to replace / evidence // … (94-95). The words are space openly on the pages, the future open-ended.

The King of Terror is a poetry collection to read slowly and to reread.

Available through your local bookstore or online: The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone, Coach House Books, 2023, ISBN 978 1 55245 470 1

What I am reading: Great Silent Ballad by A. F. Moritz

Only the squelch of her footfalls, / slap of small waves, wind ruffling. Still / Corot was with her and took her up…. [“A Woman in a Painting but Not So,” 17]

Earlier this fall, I reread The Sparrow: Selected Poems by A. F. Moritz (Anansi, 2018) in preparation for an opportunity to join the poet and a small number of others to discuss our poetry, a wonderful privilege provided by Third Thursday Reading Series (Cobourg, Ontario). That evening Al Moritz read from his newest collection, Great Silent Ballad.

I had read a review by Colin Carberry that was posted on The High Window blog (August 1, 2024). I have now read Moritz’s newest collection more than once. However, I’ve decided to share The High Window’s review because I can’t do better than Colin Carberry. Even the poems that he discusses as favourites are also favourites of mine. Nevertheless, I would like to mention two additional poems.

Great Silent Ballad contains a section that reflects on social issues (Carberry discusses “The Tawer” and the idea of exploitation and restitution.) Another poem from the section of that name is “The Tradition” (115). I like the poem for different reasons on different readings, always with an undercurrent of sadness that haunts. It suggests to me the impossibility of rising above subjugation and of Isobel Wilkerson’s book Caste: the Origins of our Discontents.

The Tradition

He descended to the dead,
wrapped an old towel around his waist,
cooked the soup,
manhandled the huge tin vat to the trestle table,
ladled into bowls,
handed to hands,
listened to lappings and suckings,
watched sad eager lips.
So my grandmother did the same.

I’ll mention one more favourite that Carberry doesn’t, “Would have Taken Up” (107-108). Like other poems at the end of the collection, the poet reflects, writes a lament. It begins: “I rise, the sun too. / It passes over and I work. / I work and it passes farther.” Time goes on. The poet asks, “What have I done”? And at the end:

…O if I’d written her
what I wanted, everything
that composed itself
in my heart, a sung world
as glorious as this one
in a moment of thought,
it would have taken up
my whole day. Sweetly,
And then: sleep. It would have
taken up
all my life.

It’s a pensive and thoughtful poem on many levels, while suggesting that while one focuses on work other things are missed. As in my previous review of still arriving by Bruce Kauffman, Moritz is a poet of a certain age, and perhaps this reflection (even if imagination and not a personal experience) does come through in the collection. What I haven’t mentioned is the boyhood section of Great Silent Ballad: buy or borrow the book and give yourself a treat.

Great Silent Ballad is a pleasure to read. The collection is Moritz’s twenty-second. These poems demonstrate craft, passion, thought, and so much more. Enjoy.

Great Silent Ballad by A. F. Moritz (Anansi, 2024) is available through your local bookstore or online (ISBN 978-1-4870-1296-0).