Brilliant Women Inc

  Jan Zwicky , on the back of Elizabeth Philips ' exquisitely lyrical collection, states that this is a book "that does not distinguish between elegy and celebration ." Now, although I rarely appreciate the flawed art of blurbing, not only is this a beautiful sentence, but it is entirely accurate in its assessment of the subject matter and intent of Philips' poems. Whether the lyrics delve into the loss of parents or the loss of trees, the focal points interweave with each other, so that a mother's dementia is gentled by the soothing sight of a "freshet of green light" ( The Last June ) or a recognition of the "difficult last years" of her father are lifted by another memory, that of discovering a well together (right away, Heaney is echoed) and their faces being reflected in the watery "aspen-inflected sky" ( Just ). There is a magic here of consolations that rarely slip into easy-solution triteness.  Much of this transcendent effe...

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...