Tag: Canadian Poetry

BOOK REVIEW: What We Know So Far Is… by Conor Mc Donnell (Wolsak and Wynn, 2025)

What We Know So Far Is…
by Conor Mc Donnell
Wolsak and Wynn (2025)

Conor Mc Donnell has published two poetry collections and three chapbooks and now this wild, exhilarating, and complex howl of a long poem: What We Know So Far Is…. 

Thirty numbered (in Roman numerals) fragments comprise the long poem. These are interspersed with 9 numbered short poems that, when read in sequence, form one long poem, which is in dialogue with the thirty longer pieces. Integral to the poetry are six pages of endnotes that provide insight into the many references and allusions Mc Donnell embeds in the poetry. This all sounds serious – and the poems are serious – but there is ample wordplay mixed with stream-of-consciousness thoughts on subjects from biology and medicine to vampire movies and musical groups that, like Mc Donnell’s writing, are experimental. Where to begin with a collection like What We Know So Far Is…?

Mc Donnell begins his endnotes with: “This book is influenced by anything and everything I have consciously/unconsciously soaked up through most if not all of my sentience to date” (87). 

Following a poetic prologue in which Mc Donnell sets up the idea of dimensions, the first poem begins: 

cars crash. Omagh. Wrists are slapped. Omaha.
Nothing happens not willed in a haptic universe (I, p 13).

Omagh, from Irish An Ómaigh, means the sacred, or virginal, plain, the site of the 1998 bombing in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles.’ Omaha is both an Indigenous People and the code name for a deadly D-Day landing during WWII. Haptic universe refers to digital sensations, simulations of touch. You can already hear the voice and see the philosophy that breathes throughout What We Know So Far Is… in the way events and ideas combine like a dream, not exactly surreal but the unconscious surfaces. 

The speaker is on a quest, seeking, imagining, and reimagining. He is interested in so many things, a tumult of ideas cascading like time.

Mc Donnell describes “this flight of ideas” that run down the pages

like
throbbing skulls on stilts, like
turtles twisting over limerick’s worth of worms,
like snacking serpents shook loose and spread across fields;
the itches they scratch will weep and leak…
erupt if left undisturbed. (III, p 15)

The collection is a cornucopia of ideas and images tumbling down the pages, a torrent, but not random nor haphazard, as one might think on first reading. For example,

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What We Know So Far Is
Interzone is safe haven within which to improvise:
This is why the first burial was the first act of love (XIIId, p 29)

The act of burial is symbolic, ritualistic, and it is evidence of love, an act bridging the liminal space between the living and the dead. …

To read the balance of the review, please click here.

BOOK REVIEW: Notes from the Ward by Seffi Tad-y (Gordon Hill Press, 2025

Review by Kathryn MacDonald

Notes from the Ward is Steffi Tad-y’s second full collection of poetry. It follows From the Shoreline and Merienda, which was nominated for the 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Tad-y’s “themes of kinship, diasporic geographies, and formations of the mind” continue in her new collection.

Steffi Tad-y makes poems out of the world she knows: the bipolar world of the title’s Ward. From the prologue poem, you will slip into Tad-y’s rhythm and her spell, her taut, compressed poems, the white space that works for her, and the way the poems resonate with each other, and you will lose yourself in Tad-y’s words, her craft. Accessibility and depth enrich these poems, a sign of a poet skilled in her craft.

The collection begins with the prologue poem, which introduces us to voice and form:

Episode

Illness, unpinnable.
In my head, I was mother

to a god,
god to a mother.

Body belonging to men.
The doctor reported

distorted, disheveled.
Desire taken to extremes.

We meet her mother, her father. She is offered

…fish stew & cake.
In an instant, I am

the days I covet,
the child in my dreams.

From the personal of “Episode,” she shifts to addresses the reader in “You Who The Earth Was For,” or is she speaking to the younger self she has just introduced? Here we witness one of the tensions within and between the poems. It holds me like a magnet.

The first poem following the epigraph, expands on the ideas expressed in the prologue poem, and it provides readers with more insight into what lies beneath the surface of the poetry.

You Who The Earth Was For

After Jean Valentine

You fleeing war, carrying a rooster with your shaky hand.
You trained to pummel, never the first to wince or flinch.

You who plant their sadness into dirt.
You whose questions have no gentle answers.

You who cook too close to the stove.
You at the table, missing the one.

You whose loss comes with wordlessness.
You beside the rubble, out to build again.

You in the backseat being loved.
You running towards water.

Knowing something of American poet Jean Valentine offers a clue to understanding Tad-y’s work. According to the Poetry Foundation website, Valentine’s “lyric poems delve into dream lives with glimpses of the personal and political.’ …David Kalstone said of her work, ‘Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of…short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings.’ Adrienne Rich wrote of Valentine’s work, ‘This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn’t approach in any other way.’” Something of the same can be said of Tad-y’s poetry, which is also political (i.e. mental health/the ward) and personal (kinship, diaspora). This high praise is deserving.

The collection includes twelve numbered poems that are sprinkled throughout the book; each is a numbered “Notes from the Ward.” #1 is a list poem – each stanza a single sentence, observations, setting. The second is disorienting, disconcerting. The third is “After Ocean Vuong’s ‘Reasons for Staying’ and lists memories, and “Seconds of optimism.”

To read the entire review please see The Temz Review here.

BOOK REVIEW: What is Broken Binds Us by Lorne Daniel

On the shoulder, waiting for a break, / me and this sleek crow, its cape / tucked and trim. (“Crushed”)

In What is Broken Binds Us, Lorne Daniel’s fifth poetry collection, he explores brokenness and the binding of lives within family and across generations and continents. The poems explore the shattering of bodies and minds, the brokenness of a society that condoned slavery and the racism that continues, and the diaspora that is reality for so many of us. Through a kind of kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold, which emphasises the cracks rather than hiding them) Daniel names the shattering with poignancy, resilience, and beauty.

The collection is skillfully organized; the poems in each section closely relate in subject and theme. But there’s also a weaving that brings the overall threads together like a tapestry.

The first poem of the first of the seven sections in What is Broken Binds Us serves as a prologue poem, introducing many of the themes in the collection in Daniel’s clear, accessible, poetic voice. In “Lessons in Emergency Preparedness” (a three-part poem), we meet a younger poet/speaker Proudly / poor and adulting hard, a husband and new father, who would clamber onto my rusted one-speed / with its great sweeping handlebars / —wide as albatross wings— / and wheel urgently to the Office / of Emergency Preparedness. Daniel takes us into the workspace and introduces the team. There is an off-hours emergency, but the Emergency Preparedness friends have 

…No plan. I checked my wrist
for some reason, then the wall
clock, the school gym. It was 12:25,
the second hand still, improbably,
moving.

​Daniel captures an existential reality, our helplessness when the world we know turns upside down. And he does this with hints of humour, surprise, and irony.

“Crushed” is the transition between the first poem, in which death appears, and the following poems in the section that explores the broken body. It contains one of my favourite images: On the shoulder, waiting for a break, / me and this sleek crow, its cape / tucked and trim. The triad of danger, fear and survival, which theme the collection.

In the second section, Daniel broadens the scope: It is easy / to dip into purse and wallet, / give back the money. Cede the land. The bullets do not go easily / back into the barrel… (“Giving Back the Dream”).

There are echoes of Joni Mitchell in “What Has Taken Place”: 

…No plan. I checked my wrist
for some reason, then the wall
clock, the school gym. It was 12:25,
the second hand still, improbably,
moving.

Daniel captures an existential reality, our helplessness when the world we know turns upside down. And he does this with hints of humour, surprise, and irony.
 
“Crushed” is the transition between the first poem, in which death appears, and the following poems in the section that explores the broken body. It contains one of my favourite images: On the shoulder, waiting for a break, / me and this sleek crow, its cape / tucked and trim. The triad of danger, fear and survival, which theme the collection.
 
In the second section, Daniel broadens the scope: It is easy / to dip into purse and wallet, / give back the money. Cede the land. The bullets do not go easily / back into the barrel… (“Giving Back the Dream”).
 
There are echoes of Joni Mitchell in “What Has Taken Place”: 

what has taken place
here where roots of Garry oak
are paved over?     what stories
have been told of this 
place?     what does placemaking mean
where place has been
taken?      taken over     meadow turned city
street     bearing the name of a Spanish
naval officer

​Daniel is a questioning poet; he urges us to think, to consider what we’re doing, what we’ve already done.

In “The Family Name,” the third section of What is Broken Binds Us, the poems dig into heritage and migration, the roots of who we’ve become and the lonely search of those in the diaspora. In Scottish English, to ken means to know, to see, to understand. The family immigrated to Canada from the U.S. and before that from Scotland. In “Kenning,” the family makes a pilgrimage to Charleston, the Magnolia Plantation, to confront slavery. “In the Family Name” is one of the most powerful poems in the book. Daniel writes, 

Stories, grief, celebration. Distance, absence, loss. Where to start, 
as a Daniel bearing the name of an English 
enslaver…
[…]
…returning to the ties, to touch
what binds, to wonder what releases
the knotted, twisted, tangled.

​In the fourth section, we return to the immediate family and the infant introduced in the first poem, now a sleepwalker, a three-year-old talker: Well into the night, he swings / from story to song. The halting rhythms / hypnotic as his voice rises and rises / until with one high note he slips away. In succeeding poems, he literarily slips away into chaos. Somehow Daniel writes these poignant poems without pathos, without sentimentality.

The theme of uncontrollable chaos lingers in the fifth section, 

Please click The Temz Review to read the balance of the review. This is where the review is published.

BOOK REVIEW: The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston

I’d sit with Napoleon in exile
and chat casually. (St. Helena)


The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston brings together sharp, edgy, quirky voices in which the actor/poet speaks for the historic and the legendary, for a songbird, oxygen, and a board of directors. On first reading of Elston’s collection, thoughts of lad lit, then theatre of the absurd surface (Six Actors in Search of an Author?), but these poems are neither superficial or existential. A second reading challenges the first impression of witty lightness. The poems imagine; they reimagine, and they question. Elston’s “voice” is clear, clever, and has something to say.

The collection’s initial poem, “The Stake,” begins: “The night before, / and Joan is certain. As ever.” Like the absurdist existential authors of the 1950s, the ending mirrors the beginning: “Oh, I’ll burn, Joan laughs. / I do every time. Your move.” The magic lies in the couplets between. The chess-playing voice asks: “Do I want to make her wonder?” In the fifth couplet Joan asks: “How can these cassocked frauds judge me, / Joan sighs. Are you like them?” The voice watches a spider. Chess, a suggestion that life and death are a game? The spider, an allusion to spider-wisdom à la Charlotte’s Web? There’s also a “fallen bishop” and much to ponder.

This prologue poem introduces key themes that thread through The Character Actor Convention. Thoughts of dying and death subtly weave through the poems, as do games. The bishop (religion) and judging also thread through the collection, as they do in “St. Helena” (21) where the voice plays cards with Napoleon:

St. Helena

I’d sit with Napoleon in exile

and chat casually.

There are more variants of Patience

named after me than any other man,

he’d mention, casually. He had a habit

of counting waves and cheating

every time we played cards.

The money meant nothing to him,

less than nothing to me.

You do know that nobody

who joins me here may leave?

he sometimes asked, while watching

the distance for sails. I dug a little hole

in the sand with my left foot.

All summer, I never told him

we don’t even have God in the future.

Joan and Napoleon aren’t the only characters that confront death. In “For a Good Time” (57), fish fly larvae “die within days.” Elston refers to other historical personalities who meet death – “eight / dead Philippes. Eleanor of Castile, / of Provence, of Aquitaine…Joan of Arc…the dead Louis’s.” But I’m struck by the fish flies – hundreds gathered on outside furniture this spring and every light-coloured surface in my river town, crunching underfoot as I walked on downtown stinking. What inspires Elston to combine fish fly larvae with these historical figures? His vision is playful, unique, and surprisingly perfect. He draws us in with the whimsy and stops us with insight and the juxtapositions of his subjects. Life is brief for both the larvae and us. Life is so brief, the voice “stop[s] gunrunning, / start[s] writing poems.”

The title poem falls mid-collection (33).

To read the full review, please click here for the link to The tEmz Review.