Tag: Poems

BOOK REVIEW: Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham

Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham is an unsettling reminder, an everywoman’s quest, to find and to understand the women of her lineage, their lost lives, their hopes, their names. Heirlooms are not enough: “a darning mushroom, / a tin of teaspoons. // Still the urge is for / story” (“Calling It Back to Me”, 3). From the first page, Graham goes in search for all the things that come together to make story, including the questions and the tensions, the conflicts that brought her maternal grandmothers to Canada’s prairies along with the colonialism that complicated their lives and the poet’s search.

The poetry is sparse, bare, leaving lots of white space on the page, which I imagine represents the unknown. So much white space. Couplets dominate, two lines working together or in opposition, run down the page in brief observations, thoughts cascading among discoveries found as in the 17-page title poem:

A small pink curl
of cloud.

No language
for any of it.

Edges of photographs
disintegrating.

Names  on the census misspelled.
Creases erasing the facts

Sadly, Graham notes, “Sometimes / a family doesn’t have / a story-keeper”.

Graham probes birth certificates, census records, ship’s records, and photographs. She questions, “Just a married name”. She admits, “I miss the lives / I have not lived”. And she draws the poem to a close and opens the way for the second section of the collection, “The Great-Grandmothers:”

This is the reckoning process.
To be careful, precise

about my thanks.
Would they be happy,

Would they be dismayed
to see me here in this future.

Graham’s crisp writing carries us forward into the puzzle of the great-grandmothers, where she gives each one her own form and voice on the page. Each is distinct, but the veil that shrouds each one makes them unknowable. Whether from Northern Ireland, or the “old country” of Sophia Czyzowski, or the beauty of the Clyde, or the one wearing a babushka in a photo, enticed by the promises of Uncle Prokop (“You can work / for yourself / not have anyone / over you”), each is mother to many, each resilient. Each unique under the homesteader category, each eking out a tough living on the prairies, each living a hard life, which takes us to the third section, “Toward an Origin Story”, where:

Under Russia’s boot,
under England’s boot,

they sailed off
to become the boot

of the plains, stamping
out the grasses and trees –

Smoothly, Laurie D. Graham broadens the focus to include environmental degradation and loss – “every arable, pilfered inch” – as well as the poli-colonial attitude toward both homesteaders and Indigenous.

To read to whole review published in TNQ, please click here.

McClelland & Stewart Poetry, 2026

BOOK REVIEW: Dani Netherclift’s Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies

Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies is Dani Netherclift’s first book, a hybrid in content and form. We’re told that the elegiac and lyrical narrative is rooted in the 1993 drowning deaths of Netherclift’s brother and father. Much of the content, particularly in the middle section stems from the author’s research, which she calls “the creative artefact of my PhD” (179). This, along with images of rumpled envelopes link the author’s narrative to her grandmother’s, along with articles photocopied from newspapers of other drownings. These weave Netherclift’s experience with those of others. She probes literature, science and magical thinking, returning time and again to the day of the drownings, to memories (hers and others), to official records, to a search for herself trapped in absence.

Place and the coincidence of familial experience are essential to the unfolding of the storyline. We’re given a hint of this with the first lines of the largely prose poem (these blocks are centred left-right on the page, justified with wide margins):

The author is witness, and also conflicted, ambiguous.

I have a collection of one-hundred-year-old
envelopes addressed to my great-grandmother,
sent from the trenches in France and Belgium
in World War I. The address the envelopes
were sent to is the place my father and brother
departed from on the day they died. This land,
Ngurai-illum Wurrung Country, forty acres,
shaped like a lopsided house turned on its
side, was colonised by my Scottish ancestors
one hundred and seventy years ago.
These envelopes are empty now.

[…]

… I witness my father and brother drown, minutes—perhaps only seconds—apart (11).

I say—Though I witnessed every moment
of their drownings,

but I didn’t witness every moment, only the
parts I could see.

I say—I saw them die,

but I’m sure their hearts were still beating the
last time I saw them.

I say—I’m sure (23).

Netherclift contemplates the way awareness creeps up on a person. Invoking the death of a great-uncle in New Guinea, she notes her great-grandmother’s body “had been marked / indelibly with absence” (68). These disparate linkages run constantly through the book. Yet, Netherclift’s skill creates a cohesive weaving, moving from example to example of the surprise of death and the wounds it leaves on the living. In example after example, there is disjuncture between what happens in the physical world and what happens to those affected. Netherclift gives us the example of Schrödinger’s cat – the 1935 experiment that highlights the unknown time in-between (69).

For a period after a person dies, the mourner’s
brain conjures an expectation to see their dead
loved one walking in through familiar doors….

To read the full review, please go to The Temz website where the review was published. Click here.

Assembly Press, 2026

BOOK REVIEW: Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000-2025by Russell ThorntonHarbour Publishing (2026)

With nine previous collections, Russell Thornton is a poet whose name you will recognize. You may have one or two of his books on your poetry shelf, but don’t assume there’s nothing to be gained from diving into Two Songs. The selected poems not only echo across time and situations, they remain fresh, relevant, and beautifully satisfying to read. A great advantage in reading this collection over twenty-five years is that you will see the consistency and the development of one of Canada’s foremost poets.

The poems in Two Songs are collected chronologically in nine sections, each containing poems chosen from individual books, plus a final section: “Uncollected and New Poems” (223-238). Thornton takes us on a journey through life, with poems focussing on childhood and parental relations, parenthood and his own children, love and violence, his home on the West Coast and his travels abroad. The collection is far-ranging in topics, themes, and place. Across this wide spectrum, Thornton’s voice sings with lyricism, boldness, and energy. From the first poem, I was engaged and enchanted, torn open and somehow soothed.

Night Tide

I stood where a tide began rushing to fullness,
drawing out long grass as it wove through sand dunes,
then walked east …
…
suddenly aware I was no longer what I had been.

This awareness, this transformation, is emblematic. The poem continues with vivid imagery until we reach the turn:

Then an old woman was at an open door.
We’re all leaving, she said. I know, I’ll be ready, I told her.
You won’t be able to keep her a secret anymore,
will you? she said. While I watched her turn and go,
I felt the one she had spoken of showing through my face.

Writing through the “dream dark,” he takes us into a space literal and magical, lays physical reality alongside the mind’s reality.

The first two poems in the collection take my breath away; they are ripe, sensuous, and layered. I cannot stop underlining, scribbling in the margins, and turning pages, until I finish the section and come up for air. I am drawn in and held by the way Thornton weaves images and metaphor, how he builds the poems with words and images that circle and repeat, search and take the reader deep inside experience and all it offers. For example, in “Creek Trout” (13), he first describes the trout then moves into metaphor:

To see the trout, to gaze after it
as the doors of the water open before it,

as the innumerable chambers of the creek open before it,
each a new exultation, a new feeling of the tough of the creek,

a new entering and entering,
…

Already, in 2000, Thornton is an accomplished poet. . . .

My review is published online at FreeFall Magazine (2026-06-22). Click here to read the entire review.

BOOK REVIEW: Birdology by Carolyn Van Der Meer (Cactus Chapbook Press, 2025)

My review of Carolyne Van Der Meer‘s chapbook, Birdology (#cactuspress, 2025) is in now available in print from Room Magazine, 49.2, the Science issue.

“These sensuous poems brim with specificity; their images linger, engage the reader, and create empathy, as in ‘Birdology II’ where we experience the fullness of our choices . . . .” Her mother needs a care home, “a place of antiseptic loneliness.”

“Van Der Meer’s insight, passion, assurance, and skill are evident in this small, focused collection. We can learn from the sparrows. Van Der Meer shows us the way.”

To respect Room‘s copyright, the review is not copied in its entirety.

BOOK REVIEW: Long Exposure by Stephanie Bolster

Long Exposure is Stephanie Bolster’s fifth and most recent poetry collection. Readers may know Bolster’s writing from her Governor General’s Award winning The Alice Poems, her first book (1998) through to her fourth, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (2012). After Wonders, she noted in an online interview with Poetry in Voice, that “increasingly I feel that the best poetry arises from some social calling, or fulfills some social need.” Long Exposure does just that. 

The collection opens with the words, “It is not something that begins.” Following about a 10-line white space giving readers time to consider, then continues:

Before there was land there was water.
A place silted itself up.
Around the time of the pyramids
parts of other places made this place.

and, so, we are introduced to Long Exposure and to New Orleans, a key place for the unfolding of Bolster’s theme.

“What began in 2009,” Bolster writes in the acknowledgements, “as an interrogation of my unsettling fascination with Robert Polidori’s photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans became an education that has lasted for 16 years and does not end here.” As Bolster probes Polidori’s images, she notes how the hurricane’s destruction was multiplied many times over by failure of the unmaintained levies. And she resurrects other disasters: Chernobyl and the nuclear meltdown of 1986, the Interment of Japanese-Canadians in B.C. during WWII, Mothers of the Disappeared in Mexico. She exposes a litany of social atrocities in the compelling and extraordinarily-crafted singular poem, Long Exposure.

Bolster’s collection is a kind of rabbit hole, a warren of man-made disasters. She tells us: 

Sometimes to look
is merciful, sometimes
to turn away. (32)

The poetic images are, themselves, horrific. In “Shelter Object,” she introduces the first of the Chernobyl poems:

The constellations made of fear. Chaos
where a shape was. Stars where a roof.

A fire where a place. The world
asleep in its bed. World irrevocable.

The heat unfathomable. They worked
shirtless. Already acute in hospital.

Soon coffins of zinc. Soon
they’d gut the wards of the dead.

The writing builds to a crescendo. Following 17 couplets, the tone and pace shift, slow to conversational speed:

His mother asked when the bus was coming and in a while
she asked and again and then didn’t and
he turned she was dead.
He covered her there in her wheelchair outside the Convention Centre.

The review is published in FreeFall Magazine, to read the full review click here.

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,

Since you’re in the post editor right now, the Tags section might just be hidden in the settings sidebar. Click the **Settings icon** (looks like a square with two uneven columns) in the top-right corner of the editor to open the sidebar, then scroll down to find the **Tags** section. Does that bring it back?

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: A Nomenclature for Light by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews

In A Nomenclature for Light, Josie Di Sciasio-Andrews’ eighth collection of poetry, she continues her exploration of the world around her. Di Sciasio-Andrews noted in a 2021 interview, that her poems are written, collected thematically, and then arranged carefully into a manuscript. Reading A Nomenclature for Light, one can see how this process continues. In this collection of individual poems, Di Sciasio-Andrews stands at the centre of each poem, observing the world around her. She opens a doorway into her thoughts and life experiences and invites us inside.

Perhaps a clue to the decision to place the poems one-after-the-other lies in the “nomenclature” of the title. As a system of naming, Di Sciascio-Andrews allows each poem’s title and verse to address the light. The continuous structure of the collection – all 101 pages of poems – runs unbroken from start to finish; and so “light” is the perfect underlying word to link the poems together in a coherent whole.

The first poem, the doorway into the collection …

To read the entire review, please click here, which will take you to The Woodlot: Canadian Reviews, Interviews, & Essays.

Mosaic Press, 2025

BOOK REVIEW: The Pollination Field by Kim Fahner (Turnstone Press, 2025)

The Pollination Field by Kim Fahner gifts lovers of bees and devotees of folklore (perhaps the first of the natural sciences) with poetry rich and layered. In these pages, Fahner confronts the immense time that bees have done the pollinating work that led to a riot of flowering plants early in the warm Cretaceous period through to today. The collection explores not science alone, it also revels in the folklore of bees, lore carried across the ocean by the Irish, Scots, and British diaspora. 

In “A Bee in the House” (3), the speaker listens to “a baritone that conjures a bagpipe’s drone.” Fahner describes the bee as “Stained glass, those wings, like tiny windows / you look through, trying to find answers to questions / that have only been imagined….” She tells us, “A bee is good luck.” Here, in the prologue poem, Fahner establishes the overriding theme, the blessing of bees, and the searching tone of the collection.

While some of the poems, like the prologue poem, are lyrical, others flirt at being prose poems. Poems with long lines. Poems that present fact. It is primarily in these that we glean the science as we do in “Bee Grabbers” (68) that looks at the “chameleon” predator, Conopidae that inject their eggs into the abdomen of bees:

Ten to twelve days. Larvae that grow, silent invasive alien, and a bumble
that buries itself—headfirst, head in sand—before it dies. In between,
from start to finish: bee suckles, ignorant of false pregnancy,
internal parasites that mark its end.

However, look deeper. Conopidae may be metaphor after all: Lost is the “keen prospects / of lively offspring. Don’t look back; your conscience might / catch up to you, turn your ankle.” The poems in The Pollination Field can trip you up, tease you; Fahner’s poetic mastery creates a honeycomb of meaning. 

The review is published in FreeFall Magazine. To read the whole review, please click here.

BOOK REVIEW: Dreams of the Epoch and the Rock by Jaspreet Singh, 10:10 by Michael Trussler, Conversations with the Kagawong River by sophie anne edwards

Some poetry books make me think; others bring joy.

These three reviews were published in Event #54.2 (Fall 2025) and now that 90 days have passed I’m free to share them with you. You can still purchase a copy here.