Tag: Spillwords

Books

• The Blue Gate (Frontenac House, 2026)
  
• Wayside: a small boat, a vacant lot, a man (Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Press, 2026)
  
• 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:

• “What’s in a Name,” has been accepted for Souwesto Anthology (2026)
  

PUBLISHED:

• “Detroit River Jazz,” “Of Wine & Fire,” “The Sky and the River,” “April 7,” Kinds of Cool: A Collection of Jazz Poetry, Anthology, Spring 2026
• “Hello from the Other Side,” winner of Scugog Arts Ekphrastic Writing contest (2026-04-19)
• “Wild Horses,” and “Again the Wind,” The High Window Press, Spring, 2026
• “Yellow Pottery,” Pinhole Poetry, 4.4, January 2026
• “Flâneuse,” Canadian Poets on Music:: An Anthology, January 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.”
• “Unmarked: A Lament for the Children Buried in the Unmarked Graves of Residential Schools,” Strong Hands Stop Violence poetry anthology, ONWA, Vol. 9 (December 2025)
• “On that Forbidden Evening,” “Willow Dream,” and “Albinoni’s Adagio,” Live Encounters, Volume Four, 16th Anniversary, November-December 2025
• “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.)

Review of Wayside: a small boat, one vacant lot, a man by Antony Di Nardo (The Miramichi Reader)

June 1, 2026 by Antony Di Nardo

Some words, when you string them together, defy their simplicity and create a world of their own. They take on the voice of their writer and that writer’s moment in time. And where mind and matter intersect, a singular world of genuine emotions, the poet’s “objective correlative,” comes to life on the page. Such is the art of Kathryn MacDonald. Hers is a vivid, intimate world, where Nature flourishes and serves as the source of her language, giving us Wayside: A small boat, one vacant lot, a man. Twenty-one poems. Twenty-one facets of a poet’s lyrical “I.”

These poems, both by design and content, are watercolours. Oils, pastels, hard acrylics, are made of edges, rely on borders, illusions based on blocks of space. I generalize, of course, but for me, watercolours blur the lines between what’s real and what is felt. They soften those distinctions between our inner and outer worlds and, in so doing, suggest sensations that intensify the human experience. Each poem in this collection has been rendered that way, with brushstrokes dipped in water, light and words. They evoke a faithfulness to life steeped in love and friendship despite the grief and sorrow of loss. And all of this MacDonald achieves without the gush of sentimentality. 

These are wonderful poems. Literally, full of wonder and acceptance of a poet’s right to rearrange feelings into words. Her images, as one would expect, are exquisite. She paints tableaux that manifest the presence of another in their absence. She writes: “his lips brush mine when we part / leaving my blue bicycle wobbling.” So much is said in those few words: minimum of brushstrokes not only illustrate a fleeting moment but paint a powerful human emotion. Her use of “wobbling” – after a succession of alliterative b’s – is a master stroke of lyricism, its sound and sense depicting a feeling I associate with the thrill of uncertainty and stirrings of physical attraction. A heron “stands on willow-whip legs,” appears as a Modigliani figure that “strolled / along the dock” and becomes “a small grey man – / before taking flight.” I am awe-struck by that compression of a human figure and a giant bird in flight, the two synchronized to evoke the beautiful contradictions of Nature’s work. And MacDonald’s craft.

The skies are sometimes grey in Wayside. There is illness and tragic ultimatums. That “small grey man” who sails the Bliss, a small boat, must also face its loss. As does the painter of these poems who “listens as his cane shatters silence” and is resigned to acknowledge that “[c]ells in his body blossom     multiply.” Loss is tragic and death inevitable, but life goes on and the poet puts that feeling into words:

Air sits heavy, burdened
with coming rain. A tear
breaks in the flock of cumulous
clouds and light slips obliquely
into the river’s mouth, slips
onto moon-round lily leaves
where flowers will one day bloom.

I so admire the cadence and sway of such fluid lines – I can’t say enough about their music, their subtle, almost imperceptible, alliterated syncopations! These lines are a testament to Kathryn MacDonald’s vivid way with words, both pictorially and sonically.

In this chapbook, kayaks resemble “elongated sunrises.” Reflections float “downriver / downriver / to the sea.” Dragonflies are dragons and “soar / in six directions, / hover / like hummingbirds.” A kiss is “as subdued as the gauzy sky, still as the mouth of the river.” Birds and flora, waterfront creatures populate these poems. And turtles. Turtles “especially.” MacDonald writes “I wonder if we were to decipher / the map carried on their backs / what journey might be revealed.” Her metaphors come naturally. They are both the light and brushstrokes of these poems. Here’s a scene she frames to portray dusk at the end of a summer’s day:

Day slips toward July’s long dusk
the quiet hour when mallards and geese
return to their nests, the great blue spreads
his wings and flies to the willow’s shadows,
an osprey circles toward its platform of sticks,
the moon-pale swans glide across the bay.

This scene sets the mood for what transpires between two people when one must leave for good. I’ve never liked the term “pathetic fallacy” to describe the way poets personify their natural environment, it seems demeaning to me. Regardless, MacDonald’s use of this device gives us lines like these: “My sorrow wreaks havoc / with fast-falling snow / as I kick through drifts / that bury the river trail / to him.” She compresses both a narrative (her friend is dying) and an intense feeling (her sorrow) in a tightly woven yarn of diction, voice and theme. As for the dynamics of form and text that structure these poems, they are, in the words of Emily Dickinson, like Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam.

MacDonald’s art comes with a clear sense and understanding of what makes poetry, and how to translate emotion into words. Wayside is evidence of that. Pick up the book, open it to any page, there you’ll find a watercolour of metaphors, imagery and soundscapes that tell a story of a small boat, one vacant lot, a man … and, not to forget how books like these really come to be, of a poet’s working mind.

Details

Kathryn MacDonald’s poetry has been published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S., and other countries. Her new poetry collection, The Blue Gate is available this Spring 2026 (Frontenac House). Kathryn has three chapbooks: Wayside: a small boat, a vacant lot, a man (Big Pond Rumours Press, 2026), Liminal Spaces , a chapbook anthology of ekphrastic poetry by Kathryn and three fellow-poets (Glentula Press, 2025), and Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (Glentula Press, 2024). Her first full poetry collection, A Breeze You Whisper: Poems, and a novel, Calla & Édourd were published by Hidden Brook Press (2011, 2009).

Publisher: Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Press (2026)

About the Reviewer/Contributor

Antony Di Nardo

Antony Di Nardo lives in Cobourg, Ontario and is the author of seven books of poetry. His most recent, Forget-Sadness-Grass (Ronsdale Press 2022), was a CBC Books poetry pick. His suite,
“May June July,” won Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. “Among the Boughs,” first published in The Fiddlehead, will appear
in this year’s Best Canadian Poetry anthology.

To read online, click here.