Brilliant Women Inc

Books that are utterly entranced by a core subject, set of images or even a haunting word compel me. I consider Tim Bowling's oeuvre of salmon and the river, and also his Tenderman texts, and then too, his tiny homage to his great-aunt Gladys and her early 20th century bee-keeping, The Annotated Bee and Me (2010).  As for bee-keeping in Canada in contemporary times, I recently read Jenna Butler's Revery: A Year of Bees (2020), a factual (but still magical) account of the practice that prepared me for some of the knowledge required to fully appreciate The Pollination Field.  I must say that this book almost felt like it needed to be two texts: one bee-obsessed and the other a sequence of the additional lyrics for her dead parents found in the Cortege section (o how I love the image of her carrying her "father's metal knees" aloft as if "crystal balls"), as well as other pieces such as "An Elegy for Australia, Burning" or "A Note on the Ex...

 Long poems are incredibly challenging to write. There is no doubting that. And especially when one is attempting to include a wide range of everything in the way of tragedy as Stephanie Bolster is in this fifth, and most ambitious collection, Long Exposure.  Its composition initially spurred on by an absorption in Robert Polidori's photographs of a post-Katrina New Orleans, this fragmented narrative incorporates Chernobyl, the Japanese village of WW II exiles known as Tashme, the economic plunderings of Expo 86, the Tohoku tsunami, home with her young daughters in Pointe-Claire, QC and, writ in smaller font as awkwardly occasional sidebars, some of the confinements and transformations of the early Covid era: "How to tip when cash is untouchable?..."In the virus spring the leaves come slow." I was thinking about TS Eliot's "heap of broken images" in The Wasteland while I read this compelling but distanciating book, and also Dionne Brand's incredibl...

Snow Flowers, an under-20 page but solidly stapled and exquisitely-designed debut chapbook by previously unknown-to-me writer Ling Ge, is a perfect argument for the need for chapbooks in today's poetic landscape. As both tasters for the poet's longer collections (past or future) and encapsulations of a particular vision, sequence or nexus, the chapbooks emerging from Anstruther Press (only 10 bucks!) feel as solid in the hand and the mind as trade books, but with far greater portability. Ge's experimentations with sestina-style repetitions and Tang Dynasty forms, along with her precise haikus, ghazals and a pantoum offer a generous introduction to her tangible craft. A longer piece, "The Time Tunnel," presents a lunging syntax, featuring a "canola" landscape where "Red Guards" beat "goslings to death" and then the speaker, labelled "Capitalist" is eventually able to flee within the interstices of italicized questions concer...

It might come as little surprise that I adore lyric poetry, real lyrics grounded in actual experience that produce their own wild and accurate sonorities. I can usually sense a faker, a Mary Oliver-type poem that strains within its own imagery, desperate to produce a responsive "ooooo ahhhhh" in the reader, rather than one that flows organically with a depth of awareness of line breaks and assonantal bridges and an emotion that emerges from its origins, not one generated superficially via the placement of "feeling words" on the page.  All of Us Hidden is that kind of book, a deep winding through familial loss and environmental torment, indigenous awarenesses and parental yearnings. The poems surge in five parts, of which only the final one "Too Fast" felt like it could have been re-shaped and the remaining pieces inserted into the prior four sections. Streetly uses the simplest of diction (salmon, rock, spruce tree) but interweaves these pure signifiers w...

  https://www.nataliezed.ca/2012/closing-the-gap-reviewing-canadian-books-of-poetry-written-by-women/

 I've been a reviewer, both paid and not, for over 15 years. Reviewing poetry books in Canada is indubitably almost a thankless task so why does one persist? Poetry is the abiding love of my life. When I write a review I feel I am providing real context for the reception of a book. Not a blurb, promo or an overview, but a critical plunge into the text, through which I am able to explore the structure, forms, history of influences and other prosodic aspects. Through this process, not only does the poet feel read, but their potential readers are given more terms and tools by which to enter the book and thereby, enable the work to impact their lives on a more meaningful level. That's the hope at any rate. Without deep readers, we are lost.  And so, after writing Marrow Reviews for 12 years on my Wordpress site for free, and trying to switch to more paid reviewing for BC Review, Alberta Views, Freefall magazine and others, I realized I cannot entirely cease the public service of r...