By Catherine Owen Imagining Imagining by Gary Barwin Wolsak and Wynn (2023) “I love the syncretic web of experience,” Gary Barwin states exuberantly in his essay “The Selected Walks,” from his compendium of celestial proportions, Imagining Imagining; in another meditation on “Writing as Rhizome,” he ponders how the making and distribution of art forms a “network of communications…you’re both the centre and there is no centre.” The centre does not want to hold! So if you’re seeking a conventional text on prosody or poetics or even a straightforward, common garden autobiography, Barwin’s pastich ..read more

By Mary Vlooswyk I Have Forsaken Heaven & Earth, but Never Forsaken You by MA Hui, translated by Leilei Chen Frontenac House (2023) Have you ever played the telephone game? The one where one person whispers in the ear of the person next to them, then they whisper to the next, until the last person shares what the message is? The fun lies in the transformation of the message as it is shared. Dalai Lama is a title given by the Tibetan people to their foremost spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. I could not help wondering how the poetry of Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso (1683 – 1706) may have ..read more

By George Elliot Clarke Faithfully Seeking Franz by Elana Wolff Guernica Editions (2023) Elana Wolff is a cosmopolitan poet—with eight collections to her credit and English, German, and Hebrew at her command—who exhibits irrepressible wanderlust as well as unrepressed wonder about our current, war-cursed world (itself the result of the Holocaust of a people and the wholesale destruction of topographies). A sometime instructor in English at Toronto’s York University and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the prize-winning, Jewish-Canadian poet undertakes her most significant prose work to d ..read more

By George Elliott Clarke The Walled Garden: Essays by Mark Frutkin Guernica Editions (2023) The Latin, floral epithet for the chaste Beloved in the Canticum Canticorum—The Song of Songs (The Song of Solomon)—is “hortus conclusus.” “She” is a garden enclosed, a private Eden that only the faithful husband may enter and relish. For Mark Frutkin, the book is the Beloved, and so his Walled Garden is a florilegium of subjects, essays on everything from Michelangelo’s temple of sacred art to the masterful cinema of Fellini and Tarkovsky and others. Frutkin’s Walled Garden—like Whitman’s democratic ci ..read more

By Katherine Matiko Antecedent by Juleta Severson-Baker Frontenac House (2023) Juleta Severson-Baker dedicates Antecedent to her ancestors, so it was no surprise to encounter a boy coming to terms with life and death on the prairie (My Father) and the multigenerational impact of a child’s drowning (The River). But as I read further, I was surprised to find myself in so many of these evocative poems. For example, Severson-Baker writes eloquently about the loss of her mother. My sisters and I recently became “motherless girls,” as the poet puts it, in the fifth and sixth decades of our lives. We ..read more

By Mary Vlooswyk Among the Untamed by dee Hobsbawn-Smith Frontenac House Poetry (2023) Among the Untamed by dee Hobsbawn-Smith is an exploration of how to be a woman in today’s world. Through her poetry, Hobsbawn-Smith tackles the many forms of violence against women “Mourning Mothers,” aging “Faith-writing in the dark,” accepting one’s body “Jeanne Dark comes of age on the prairie,” as well as the subtleties of female friendship “Sharing mason jars.” She takes the reader on a journey from farm life “Jeanne Dark contemplates the prairie sky” to the city “The Only,” back to the farm “Where Jean ..read more

By Steven Ross Smith Surface Tension by Derek Beaulieu Coach House Press (2022) Following on and expanding upon the appearance and evolution of concrete poetry, which exploded language’s visual and representational potential in the 1950’s Derek Beaulieu’s Surface Tension captures, in a small square book – à la Bob Cobbing’s bill jubobe, also from Coach House (1976) – sets of stirred and swimming lettristic images. In nine discrete sequences Beaulieu’s language elements – its letters, its surfaces – are rendered in swirls, grids, clusters, and trailings, using Letraset – that plastic dry-transf ..read more

By Katherine Matiko Circle Tour by Eva Tihanyi Inanna Publications and Education Inc. (2023) Eva Tihanyi’s Circle Tour takes readers on a spiralling journey from hope to societal and personal disharmony and back to hope again. Her tautly-written poetry brims with memorable imagery. I discovered poems within her poems; stanzas such as Eschatology’s On the pages of now: the past / indelibly present, a haunting watermark could stand alone and bear cherishing. The book is divided into three sections: Outer Circle, Inner Circle, and Centre. In Outer Circle, Tihanyi’s examination of our defective wo ..read more

By Jennifer Cox Deriving by Jennifer Bowering Delisle University of Alberta Press (2021) While it is an unusual choice to open a poetry book with a Descartian theory on the birth of worms, it makes an apropos introduction to Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s Deriving. Like a parent trying to answer their child’s question of how babies are made, Deriving searches for rationales for the inexplicable. It is a meandering and meaningful questioning of who we are and where we come from. Deriving opens with Descartes, who: “thought worms birthed spontaneous/in soil and heat. Sudden maggots in rotting flesh ..read more

By Vincent Potter I Wish I Could Be Peter Falk by Paul Zits University of Calgary Press (2022) Paul Zits opens this collection with the perfect dedication: “for Me (& Ryan Gosling).” And it is. I Wish I Could Be Peter Falk is for Zits, for Gosling, and for any man who feels commodified and evaluated for their masculinity. It is a sarcastic—perhaps bitter—reflection, not of a man who feels unsuccessful in love or identity, but of a man who is cynical toward his “successes.” The result is a strange and refreshing take, a set of journal entries that remain honest even through self-grandiosi ..read more