The Trouble with Beauty by Bruce Rice Published by Coteau Books Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $16.95 ISBN 978-1-55050-572-6 After completing poet Bruce Rice’s exquisite collection The Trouble with Beauty, the following question resounds: how can anyone not just appreciate poetry, but also help from falling deeply down the well in love with it? I consumed the bulk of the work in a coffee shop with an espresso machine, the conversation of strangers, and speakered-jazz trying their best to divert my attention, but Rice held me fast with his deeply-affective poems that explore landscape, the passing of time, the Self, and-as the title suggests-the beauty of it all. Disclaimer: I know Rice, a seasoned Regina poet and editor, but when I read his work I completely disassociate the poems from the person. Great poetry enables this. Some poets manage a few good lines in a book. Some a few good poems. Rice hits the emotional jackpot line after line, transporting readers into a higher-planed world of light, passing clouds, and “the shallow brown river\that seems not to move, all the while cutting away the time we have left.” The Contents page itself reads like a poem as you scroll down…

for what it is by Joan Newton Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Kris Brandhagen $16.95 978-1-894431-90-3 The first things I noticed about for what it is by Joan Newton were its title, and its cover image. The cover shows a painted image of a floating table on top of which sits a pair of reading glasses next to a book set facedown to save the page. The objects seem about to slide off the table, providing tension although it appears, at first glance, to be very calm and relaxing. Throughout for what it is, I noticed a variety of poetic devices. Newton pays close attention to how she uses vowels and consonants in each poem, including conversational language, affecting the way the poems sound. Newton’s approach to writing is playful; her lines sometimes continue without pause, and at times she uses rhythm, rhyme, and circular structure. In the poem “Moment” Newton explores a pleasurable experience with which many readers will likely identify: She upends the paper bag over her small son’s cupped hands shaking into them the last of the sugary crumbs. Snuffling up the sweetness, he rubs his face laughs and they are happy. This poem…

Boy by Victor Enns Published Hagios Press Review by Regine Haensel $17.95 ISBN 978-1-926710-14-3 I first met Victor Enns when he was Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, work which he did extremely well. With Boy, his fourth book of poetry, he shows more of his varied abilities, and tells us: “The Gretna yard is still the place I dream from” It is often a childhood place that holds us captive, helping to define our adult selves. Though Enns was born in Winnipeg, he grew up in Gretna, Manitoba. Currently, he works as Publishing and Arts Consultant for Manitoba Culture, Heritage, and Tourism. Enns attended the University of Manitoba, and was a founding board member of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild. The book contains haunting, humourous, and singing poems, some with a twist at the end that makes us see the world differently. It begins with the experiences of a toddler connecting with his mother, and progresses into the early teen years of peer friendship in the city of Winnipeg. We find the interconnections of family life with the singular experiences of one boy growing up. But these poems do more than merely evoke an idyllic prairie childhood. It is…

In the Tiger Park by Alison Calder Published by Coteau Books Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $16.95 ISBN 9-781550-505764 Sometimes one reads a book and, upon completion, thinks: Hmm, I bet I could be friends with this writer. This was my sentiment after completing In the Tiger Park by Winnipeg writer and university professor Alison Calder. What I most appreciated was Calder’s original and clear-eyed view on a variety of interesting subjects, including a dead poet’s clothes; impressions of Scottsdale AZ; witnessing a bride and groom having their wedding photos taken in a cold September lake; elephants; China; the moon; the experience of blind children; and football (Calder hails from a Saskatchewan Roughrider-loving clan). We sense the poet’s perceptiveness in her very first (and second longest) poem, “Blind children at the Natural History Museum, 1913,” in which she credibly describes how the various animals and objects might feel beneath the fingers of these children. The poem “On finding P.K. Page’s old clothes” is just three stanzas long-but they contain so much! We are treated to the wonderful world “selvedges” and to the ear-pleasing “They turn to metaphor\and mites.” We see “Their pearls glimmer\in cardboard darkness,” and when the dresses tear,…

man from elsewhere by Lorna Crozier Published by JackPine Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $30.00 ISBN 978-1-927035-09-2 Swift Current-born Lorna Crozier is one of the brightest lights in Canadian poetry. If you read poetry-and no, it is definitely not a genre to be afraid of-you’ll know that her name is a household word among poetry readers. She’s published numerous critically-acclaimed books, has won the Governor General’s Award for poetry, presents internationally, and is one of Canada’s most read and appreciated poets. It’s difficult to know for certain why some poets succeed and others burn quietly or flash out immediately. Certainly for “staying power” one must possess talent and its sisters: originality, skilled craftsmanship, and intelligence. One must have interesting things to say, and express these things in masterful and memorable ways. It also helps to be entertaining. Crozier possesses all of these attributes. She’s made her readers laugh and cry, and one might argue she’s even shocked us over the years. Why then, would a big name poet publish a hand-bound, limited edition chapbook with Saskatchewan publisher JackPine Press? Perhaps because some work, like the fervent love poems found in man from elsewhere (co-created with Saskatonians Lisa Johnson and…

Blue Grama by Heather Peat Hamm Published by Wild Sage Press Review by Justin Dittrick ISBN 978-0-988 1229-6-3 $18.00 Heather Peat Hamm’s collection of poems, songs, and illustrations, Blue Grama, offers readers a rich field study in monographic perspective, demonstrating this ecological poet’s masterful command of detail and description that holds the prairies in their clearest, most vivid light. No aspect of prairie fields, or people who call the prairie land their home, is too small or too hidden, to attract this poet’s perspicacious eye. These are poems not just to read, but to assimilate with care, as one assimilates the defining characteristics revealed in a botanist’s handbook. The poem’s are a celebration of a distinct livelihood—one that is seldom presented with such joie de vivre. The collection’s greatest triumph might be that it metaphorically couples the hardships, pathos, joys, and raptures experienced by the land’s people with penetrating insight into that which perseveres among them, the creatures and plants that share the conditions of life, wondrously unique, yet familiar, in their adaptive movements. The people and the land become intertwined as one reads the poems and studies the drawings painstakingly sketched and labelled by a deft poet-scientist. Like the…

The Daughter of a Lumberjack by Melanie Merasty Published by JackPine Press Review by Alison Slowski $30 ISBN 978-1-927035-08-5 In this novel idea for a suite of poetry, we meet two recurring characters: a young woman and her father, the lumberjack. The reader can smell the gorgeous pine, can almost taste the sap, and can see the lumberjack father’s stubbly grey beard glittering in the light of the morning sun rising over the tops of the trees. This group of poems tells the story of a woman trying to understand her father through the framework of his history and trade. Allusions are made to her immigrant grandfather, the teacher of her father in the trade. The family’s home life is delicately touched on in “Kindling.” The collection paints a picture of the man himself. Some themes explored in this collection of poetry are that of family, of the trials and tribulations they face as the family of a lumberjack, and of the bonds that keep them together, stronger than the chains a lumberjack uses for cutting down trees. The poem “Sap” in particular tells us of Merasty’s journey: “As if I know the way a tree falls the way it…

The Survival Rate of Butterflies In The Wild by Murray Reiss Published by Hagios Press Reviewed by Jackie Blakely $17.95 ISBN 978-192671020-4 The Survival Rate of Butterflies In The Wild by Murray Reiss is a hauntingly beautiful book of poetry, influenced largely by Reiss’ childhood memories of his Jewish family’s struggles – not only with their new life in Canada, but with living with the knowledge that they survived the horrors of the holocaust in Poland, while family members perished. Sadness and an aching longing are sewn into the themes in Reiss’ poems. His work depicts the emptiness felt by his grief-riddled father, shown by the silence that existed in their relationship. This silence held the pain and guilt that Reiss’ father could not bear. Unanswered letters and postcards that never came are recurring themes that illustrate the profound sense of loss his father felt; but more dramatic still is the sense of Reiss’ shame at having survived at all. In the title poem, “The Survival Rate Of Butterflies In The Wild”, Reiss uses a walk through a butterfly park as an analogy to the life of a Jewish person, and in particular, his own life. Reiss writes of opting…

How to Be a River by Brenda Niskala Published by Wild Sage Press Review by Justin Dittrick ISBN 978-0-9881229-2-5 $15.00 Brenda Niskala’s How to Be a River offers to readers a set of poems as diverse as they are nuanced, as piercing as they are enigmatic. Niskala’s writing is crisp and tight, unburdened by sentimentality, and the poems glimmer with an immediate and luminous arousal of recognition, of the sense of truly “being here.” The poems capture surprising crossways of feeling and consciousness, with subjects that range from the tragic, such as in “Blunt Instrument”, a poem about a young man lost to his loved ones and subject to the criminal justice system, to the provocative “Room Full of Men”, a poem whose character, Anita, will arouse much discussion for her free, unquenchable spirit and her ardent devotion to men. Niskala is a poet with exquisite taste in subject matter and a native ability to capture forms and expressions of human connectedness. The poems in this collection are not only luminous, but they transport the reader with their tracings of the numinous. Niskala writes with an attentive human interest, and her work is rooted in seldom explored realms and rhythms…

and i think to myself by June Mitchell Published by Benchmark Press Review by Justin Dittrick $15.00 ISBN 9-78192-73520-1 June Mitchell’s collection of poems, and i think to myself, brims with wisdom, imagination, and experience. It is much more than a collection of poems. It is the product of a lifetime as a humanitarian, much of which was spent in the pursuit of social activism and social justice. It is also the expression of a lifelong passion for literature and poetry, a pastime that bears much fruit, here. Mitchell’s collection must not only be read, but celebrated, for its depths and truths testify to the fullness of a woman’s life, its contents ringing out to the ear with mirth, joy, despair, outrage, and wonder. Written later in life, one of many discoveries in this collection is how it is positioned towards the providential. It is all the more remarkable for being a natural inclination in its speakers, for from this inclination, much wisdom appears. In “déjà vu”, the speaker contemplates the origin of the desire for a better world. In “resolution”, there is an embrace of god in nature, and with it a denial of the artificial. The two go…