Dog and Moonby Kelly ShepherdPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9781779400383 Quirky contradictions, interconnectedness, and more swerves than the North Saskatchewan—Kelly Shepherd’s Dog and Moon delivers an audacious selection of poems that’ll make you think and possibly cheer, thanks to wordplay concerning the natural world, domesticity, etymology, poetry workshops (“Describe snow to someone who has never experienced it before”) and metaphors against a backdrop of shadows, mirrors, moons, frogs, feathers, Canadian writers and “concrete-coloured snow.” In this third poetry collection, Shepherd’s used the ancient ghazal form for inspiration, but he gives his couplets a contemporary twist with reverberations, koan-like riddles, a dash of politics and lines that had me smiling. Even titles are a hoot: “The Poetics of Space Heaters,” and “If Your Eyes Weren’t Prisms, Would You Notice?” Prediction: this book will earn awards. Firstly, the pairings and unusual juxtapositions. The book begins: “A man walks out of a forest. What walks out of him?” In the second poem: “Fish grow leafy fins and tails. Trees grow fish-shaped leaves./The trees, water, fire of childhood.” The poet takes two things, ie: fish and trees, then throws in a random third element, ie: “fire of childhood.”…

Shift by Kelly Shepherd Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $17.95 ISBN 978-1-77187-104-4 I was looking for “shifts” in Kelly Shepherd’s poetry collection, and I found them. Shepherd lives and teaches in Edmonton, and his gritty book, Shift, is testament to the fact that his hands have worked more than a pen. The author’s been part of the multitude that migrated to Fort McMurray for work, and he shows us many sides of that “orange-hardhat” dynamic, from workers “loading into buses before dawn, getting paid to build something\we don’t understand for someone we don’t know” to the “endless crumpled sky” and a “landscape\painting on the lunchroom wall” that is “of another place, not here”. Shift, then, refers in part to shift work, or a work-shift. I also found it in poems like “Honing,” about cement grinding\smoothing. The shift here comes when the narrator recognizes that the “ugly, utilitarian, dusty” cement “[opens] itself up and\the stones glimmer like stars”. There are dramatic shifts in weather during all-day drives, that moment “when the steering wheel started to bloom” and “the windshield blinked in the sun”. In the title poem, the shift concerns a diving grebe and a duck’s lift…