Poem – Kathryn MacDonald

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.

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.

What I’m reading: Legwork by Michael Vince

In July, I read a review of Legwork by Michael Vince, his tenth collection, in The High Window Reviews. I travel and often write about my experiences and was curious; I ordered the book.

The reviewer, Edmund Prestwich, notes how the poet “interweaves gravity with quirky humour,” how the poems often include a “shimmer of implicit reflections,” and sometimes the poems take on a “more cerebral, conceptual form.”

Although the poems are set in specific places with specific details, the actual location is not named, and the poet manages, with apparent ease, to jump the gap from personal to universal. I often find the poems take me on a surprising journey, as my favourite poem does:

Spa Town

We walk to the spa town, just a small village,
hard going in the heat, though nobody seeking
for its healing waters goes there on foot,
uphill and down, it’s just too much for them,
like the sudden appearance of a tethered bull
or a flurry of chickens, where rocks and pines
hide the sea view. On the spa town streets
elderly folk no longer linger over lunch,
or smoke and sip at coffee, but well wrapped
in layers of showy abstinence and in cosy
dressing-gowns seek health-restoring waters.
Here we watch one, an old man in pyjamas,
stroll out unsteadily down a concrete pier
towards the ocean, followed by a ginger cat,
tail up, pacing to keep company. The man
turns back several times and mutters,
exchanging nods with this attentive creature
who hasn’t come here for its health. They look
like a couple out for a walk, taking the air
on holiday. When they reach the end of the pier
perched above the waves, the cat sits
and grooms. The old man lights a cigarette,
and convinces himself that nobody can see,
while the ginger cat waits, much like a nurse,
or a child out with grandpa, who comes each year
for coffee-less, wine-less days. The old man
gazes out, where the healing waters mingle
with the bitter salt. He takes laboured breaths,
then turns. He says the word, the cat agrees,
and they both begin their slow return to the shore.

A poem with a very different feel from “Spa Town” is “Borderland,” which begins: “She told me the day they crossed over, / almost as if it was a holiday….” It’s a homecoming poem in which memory, dissociation, and the absurd collide. In part 2, Vince writes: “People from across the border / come here to walk around the suburb, / the designs are quite famous, / people whose grandparents lived here / when it was another country. …Home, that’s a flexible idea, isn’t it? / Have some more wine.”

Vince writes on his website: “I’ve always been interested in the historical and psychological pressure points of living in a particular place…. As I have lived and worked for much of my life in other countries, and being part of a bi-cultural family, my writing explores places and people, feelings and experiences, with that perspective. I believe that we constantly explore and recreate such identities, which shift through time and place and language….”

If you follow my reviews, you know that I read many Canadian writers. Yet, I think it’s important to read widely and internationally. There are different tones, different ways to find the core of a subject, shifts of perspective. What are you reading?

What I’m rereading: the book-length poem

I love a long poem and the collections that follow the narrative thread of a journey from page one to the end – whether it flows, as a novel, or whether it’s more of a sequence of shorter poems that unravel the story.

Ottawa poet Monty Reid says that “the sequence accommodates interruptions more readily, it stops and starts, tries to hold it together, begins again…. (interview by rob mclennan, above-ground press).

The books that I’ve selected to highlight today include both flowing book-length poems and sequence collections.

I’ve reviewed only two of the long-poem collections that have been sitting in my “to write about” stack. But it’s summer reading time, and I’m not going to get the job done. So here is a reading list to take you through August and beyond.

Two that I’ve reviewed:

Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney: an illustrated edition “is beautiful to read, vivid, alive,” to quote from my review (W.W. Norton, 2008). Click here.
Iolaire by Karen Clavelle “is a hybrid telling of one of Scotland’s worse maritime disasters, a story of an island’s grief, a woman’s loss, and by the end, a new (though haunted) beginning” (Turnstone Press, 2017). Click here.

Others of the book-length form that I recommend as good summer reading include:

Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard by Jenna Butler (University of Alberta Press, 2018)
Dart by Alice Oswald (Faber and Faber, 2002)
The Long Take by Robin Robertson (Anansi, 2018)
The Caiplie Caves by Karen Solie (Anansi, 2019)
Three books by Kim Trainor: Karyotype (Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (Book*Hug, 2018), and a fragmented narrative, A thin fire runs through me (icehouse poetry, 2023)
Omeros by Derek Walcott (Farrar, Straus, and Geroux, 1990)

And finally, a collection by M. Travis Lane titled The Witch of the Inner Wood. Like novellas, these poems celebrate the long poem format. Lane’s book marks the consistent achievement of one of Canada’s leading poets (icehouse poetry, 2016).

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.

Books & Poems Published

Books

Liminal Spaces (a collaborative ekphrastic chapbook, Glentula Press, 2025)
Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (chapbook, Glentula Press, 2024)
A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (HBP/Hidden Brook Press, 2011). Review excerpt: please see here.

Calla & Édourd: Fiction. For an excerpt, please see here. (HBP/Hidden Brook Press, 2009)

The Farm & City Cookbook: Essays and recipes co-authored with Mary Lou Morgan. (Second Story Press, 1995)

FORTHCOMING:

“On that Forbidden Evening,” “Willow Dream,” and Albinoni’s Adagio,” Live Encounters, forthcoming November-December 2025
“Yellow Pottery,” Pinhole Poetry, forthcoming Winter 2026
“Wild Horses,” The High Window Press, forthcoming Spring, 2026
“Weathering Water-Wave Theory,” Consilience Journal, Columbia University, forthcoming Fall, 2025 — The editors wrote: “Our reviewers enjoyed reading your poem, which highlights moments when opposing forces come together—whether in nature or within ourselves. We also admired the choice of words, the use of enjambment and punctuation, and the masterful use of meter.”
“Detroit River Jazz,” “Of Wine & Fire,” “The Sky and the River,” “April 7” have been accepted for the anthology Kinds of Cool: A Collection of Jazz Poetry, Fall 2025
“Flâneuse” has been accepted for the anthology Canadian Poets on Music” published by Syncopation, January 2026
“Unmarked: A Lament for the Children Buried in the Unmarked Graves of Residential Schools,” Strong Hands Stop Violence poetry anthology, ONWA,Vol. 9

PUBLISHED:

“Weathering Water-Wave Theory,” Consilience Journal, Columbia University, (2025-09-22)
“Desire,” Spillwords (2025-09-07)
“I Could Melt,” Spillwords (2025-03-27)
“Blue without a Name,” Spillwords (2024-12-12)
“Yellow,” The High Window (Winter 2024)
“Actias Luna,” Uproar, Lawrence House Centre for the Arts (2024-11-18)
“Awakening” and “Turning,” Hill Spirits VI (2024-ISBN 978-1-998494-07-1)
“Cordivae,” and “Yellow: of Horses and Flowers,” Pinhole Poetry (Desire theme, July 2024)
“Wild Place,” Juniper (Vol. 8, Issue 1; Summer 2024)
“A Half-Golden-Inch,” Jerry Jazz Musician Poetry Collection (Spring-Summer 2024)
“Charlie Parker Plays Embraceable You” and “N NE E SE S SW W NW,” Synaeresis: Arts + Poetry, XXIV (June 2024)
“Moontreader,” “Follow Birds & Dreamers,” “Of Sages & Seas & Butterfly Wings,” Lothlorien Poetry Journal: Free Spirits, Volume 31 (Print, Spring 2024).
“The River Sings a Clear, Deep Song,” Humana Obscura (Spring 2024: print edition on Amazon & digital, page 95).
“The Mallard and the Crow” and “The Candle,” The High Window (Poetry, Spring 2024).
“Nostalgia,” Jerry Jazz Musician (January 2024).
“Moontreader,” “Follow Birds & Dreamers,” “Of Sages & Seas & Butterfly Wings,” Lothlorien Poetry Blog (December 2023) and included in the anthology, Lothlorien Poetry Journal: Free Spirits, Volume 31 (Print, Spring 2024).
“Lapedo Child,” and “Love Your Hat,” Stones Beneath the Surface: a poetry anthology (Black Mallard Poetry, November 2023, pp 108-111).
“On the Edge,” Dust Poetry Magazine (2023-10-28).
“She Sings Only at Twilight,” “Company of Wayfarers,” “A Blizzard Blows,” “Phantasm,” and “Beloved,” Lothlorien Poetry Journal Volume 28 (print and online) Sept. 30, 2023).
“Musical Invocation” poem profiled and read/recorded, Jerry Jazz Musician (September 2023).
“Foraging,” Pinhole Poetry 2.2, July 2023.
“Beneath the Horse’s Hooves,” Room Literary Magazine, Spring 2023
“Skydancing” and “Legacies,” Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2023 (p 120-123)
“E/mergence,” Juniper, Fall 2022
“Sing Praises,” “Slant,” “The Shedding,” Hill Spirits V, Blue Denim Press, 2022
“Words are Wet,” “Rainfall,” The Story of Water – 3^rd Annual Earth Day eChapbook, April 22 2022
“Night Flyer,” “Luna Cat,” Framed & Familiar: 101 Portraits, Wet Ink Books, July 11, 2022
“Not an Edward Hopper Painting,” Jerry Jazz Musician (U.S.) Summer 2022
“Don’t Ask this of Me,” “Passage Dreaming,” Jerry Jazz Musician, Winter 2021
“Kenya: at the end of the day,” Orbis: Quarterly International Literary Journal (England) #198, Winter 2021
“Making Soup,” “Quarantine Wishes,” Our Pandemic Times, Blue Denim Press, 2021
“Duty/Deon,” won Arc’s Awesomeness prize, January 2021
“Miles Davis Plays: ‘Blue in Green,’” “The Spaces Between: Miles Davis,” Jerry Jazz Musician, May 27 2021
“Apparitions,” Devour: Art & Lit Canada, #11, Summer 2021
“Willy Nelson Sings Stardust,” “Undersong,” The High Window (England) #23, August 2021
“Miles Davis Plays ‘Blue in Green,’” Jerry Jazz Musician (U.S.) Summer 2021
“A Dry July,” Amethyst Review (U.S.)
“Wild Plums,” Amethyst Review (U.S.)
“Of Hunger & Fire,” Amethyst Review (U.S.)
“Shadows,” Spirit of the Hills (arts organization) website, November 2020.
“Quarantine Wishes,” Between Festivals: A Journal in Time of Pandemic and Lockdown, November 27 2020
“City of Tulum,” Orbis: Quarterly International Literary Journal (England) #191, Spring 2020
“10 Panku,” Devour: Special International Edition (58-59) #5 April 2020
“Dockside,” “The Failed Search,” The Beauty of Being Elsewhere, anthology ed. by John B. Lee, (Brighton: Hidden Brook Press, 2020
“Tartan Lament,” Crossways Literary Magazine (Ireland), #10 June 2020
“Seduction,” Freefall, Fall 2020 (shortlisted for Freefall Annual Poetry Contest), ed. by Gary Barwin
“The Doves Seem to Croon Tippy Canoe Tippy Canoe,” “Making Soup,” Between Festivals: A Journal in Time of Pandemic and Lockdown, Summer 2020
“Honey Light,” Amethyst Review, August 2020
“Daddy,” Devour: Art & Lit Canada, ed. by Bruce Kauffman, #8, Summer 2020, p91
“Alone,” “Song,” Jerry Jazz Musician, December 16, 2020
“The Swing,” Jerry Jazz Musician, December 28, 2020
“Choreography,” Amethyst Review, 2019-09-24
“Past Midnight,” Amethyst Review, 2019-08-29
“Casting Off,” Devour: Art & Lit Canada (Issue 03, p. 42).
“Journey,” “Ashes,” This Wine into Water, a chapbook anthology (Forward by Lorna Crozier, Wintergreen Studios Press, December 2018.)
Earlier writing was published in literary journals including the Fiddlehead (#130 Summer 1981) Descant (#32-33 1981) and Northward Journal (#20 June 1981) as well as anthologies such as The Wisdom of Old Souls (2008), Grandmothers Necklace (2010), Close to Quitting Time (2011). (Some early poems published as Kathryn Deneau.)