apart: a year of pandemic poetry and proseEdited by Courtney Bates-Hardy and Dave MargoshesPublished by Saskatchewan Writers’ GuildReview by Toby A. Welch$24.95 ISBN 9780968845172 I have a hunch that as our lives return to a more normalized state, this book will become even more powerful. When Covid is a distant memory, the stories will take us back to this time filled with chaos and uncertainty. What a great permanent record! This book will not collect dust as time passes.  I have never recommended a book as good for every member of the human race but this one I do. Every one of us has been touched by Covid, directly or indirectly. We are all dealing with the effects that the virus brought into our world. Having a book that chronicles the anxiety and emotions of this period in our lives is invaluable.  apart is made up of both poetry and essays (and one awesome screenplay tossed in to mix things up.) Some are short and some are lengthy. One of the most powerful pieces is on page two, a poem by Mary Maxwell made up of four words repeated over and over again: Covid, Trump, News, and Fear. That poem…

A Calendar of Reckoning by Dave Margoshes Published by Coteau Books Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $17.95 ISBN 9-781550-509373 Readers can sometimes glean the foci of a book even before reading the first page. With A Calendar of Reckoning, the new poetry collection by multi-genre and widely-published writer Dave Margoshes, clues rise from the cover image – a dog facing a window (surely symbolic) and the opaqueness (clouds? Heaven?) beyond – and the title. Reckoning is a strong, old-fashioned word with Biblical overtones. It implies a measuring up ­­­- to God, perhaps, or to one’s self. I expect time will be addressed (“Calendar”); the seasons, and possibly aging. And the dog? If I know Dave – and I do – there’ll be at least one homage to a dog. The Saskatoon-area writer’s organized this latest impressive collection into four sections, and indeed the poems in each section are distinct. In the first, Margoshes delivers a chronological retrospective of his life from birth to “The Heart in its Dotage”. Here we meet the thin, daydreaming boy: “Gradually, with the passage of time, the world I imagined/narrowed, and I put on weight, grew into myself”. He includes several poems about family members…

Wiseman’s Wager by Dave Margoshes Published by Coteau Books Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $21.95 ISBN 978-1-55050-601-3 Winter’s an especially wonderful time to settle in with a thick and thought-provoking novel, and Coteau Books provides one that fits the bill nicely. Wiseman’s Wager is by the prolific and award-winning Dave Margoshes, who has been entertaining readers with his novels, short story collections, poetry, and nonfiction (a biography of Tommy Douglas) for decades. The Saskatchewan-based writer has now spun a 382-page tale about two Jewish-Canadian brothers, both in their 80s, and their often tumultuous lives. There’s a gun, and prison time. There are multiple marriages, Yiddish, and the Communist Party. There are counselling sessions with a desirable female psychologist, and there’s a wife in a 12-year coma. This dialogue-driven novel is less about plot, however, and more about the relationship between the brothers-and the family they’ve lost-and how memory kicks in and out, seemingly of its own volition, like a weak signal on an ancient radio. Zan, the intellectual protagonist, wrote a novel (“The Wise Men of Chelm”) that was a failure when published in 1932, but re-released 30 years later to great acclaim. Throughout the story feisty Zan mourns his…

A Book of Great Worth by Dave Margoshes Published by Coteau Books Review by Michelle Shaw $18.95 ISBN 9 781550 504767 On the surface, award-winning Saskatchewan-based author Dave Margoshes’s latest offering is a beautifully written collection of biographical stories about his father’s life. Except that the stories are fiction. Although based, says Margoshes, on “a seed of truth” and imbued with “the persona and personality of [my] father”, they are all fiction. The result is a selection of carefully crafted tales, written over a number of years, which relate various incidents in his father’s life. Margoshes says he “worked hard, with the stories’ structure and a sort of old-fashioned expository style, to make them feel like memoir — like truth…[he] also worked hard to imbue these stories with a tension created by that unstated question of how the narrator came to know not just the stories, in their broad strokes, but the fine details.” He succeeded. At first I was consciously trying to work out what was true but I soon found myself enveloped in the stories. Most of the book is set in New York City in the early decades of the twentieth century. Margoshes crafts an almost sensory…