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Poetry

Manahil Bandukwala: The edge is impossible to see at all, Review of A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen by Erin Noteboom

Posted on January 11, 2024

In A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen, Erin Noteboom merges her background as a particle physicist with poetry. She excavates intangible and indescribable moments from scientific experiments to blur lines between worlds that otherwise seem separate.

Stop! Look! Listen! Mary Dean Lee's Listening Recommendation

Posted on December 5, 2023

I recently discovered a unique album called “I am in Need of Music: Songs on Poems by Elizabeth Bishop.” The Silken Water Suite with music composed by Alasdair MacLean and featuring soprano Suzie LeBlanc is arresting and beautiful. The four parts are: I. The silken water is weaving and weaving; II. Dear, my compass; III. Close, close all night; IV. Breakfast song. 

Stop! Look! Listen! Simon Brown’s Reading Recommendation

Posted on October 5, 2023

When I read Lisa Jarnot, it makes me want to write. So, given my frequent creative slumps, I keep Lisa’s collections close to my writing desk. I love all of them, but Ring of Fire is perhaps my favourite. It’s the kind of book you can either open up anywhere and plunge into for two minutes, or let yourself become engrossed, and reread the whole thing.

Excerpt of "We Could Fill A River" by Douglas Walbourne-Gough

Posted on July 12, 2023
"We Could Fill A River" by Douglas Walbourne-Gough
 
The Wolastoq flows below me. Spring
ice is receding, this year’s first blue herons
bring sun. They call me outside to warm my
snow-weary bones. I’ve crossed this bridge
often, stopped to watch people fish, couldn’t
resist comparing this river to the rum-brown
water of the Humber I’ve never fished
but grew up convinced I’d drown in.
 
I’d watched The Country, broke down

Stop! Look! Listen! Ronna Bloom's Book Recommendation

Posted on July 12, 2023

Phil Hall’s new book, The Ash Bell, undoes me. His work makes me read below the below and out the corners of my eyes. Drops me down under understanding, echos of words like backlit other words waving their fronds. I read the word “worship" and see “warship." It's blunt, raw, funny and true. Cumulative. I do not understand, I stand under, happily. 

Stop! Look! Listen! Dawn MacDonald's Book Recommendation

Posted on July 5, 2023

The literary lives of us rural folks can be overly shaped by whatever happened to be available at our local library, or that one random anthology we found in a "free books" pile. I was extremely fortunate to have that anthology be The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. What a revelation! Kenneth Koch's sense of play, Frank O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems, the whole New York School in general -- the Beats -- it just blew my head off. I had no idea you could do this stuff.

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