My mantra choked /from a bluebird’s neck.” Her basic style is rapid-fire delivery of inventive imagery and challenging associative leaps. In the section “Magnetic Variations on One and Six,” the organizing principle is based on linking colours with particular letters of the alphabet. But the book’s most powerful poems turn toward weightier subjects: grief, mortality, the passage of time and, yes, the soul’s longings. The “before” poems have an elegiac sense of distance, while the combat poems have a jarring immediacy: the lines stutter and break into fragments. you wanted to be/a child again.” Barbara Carey is a Toronto writer, and the Star’s poetry columnist.

Source: thestar September 01, 2017 10:30 UTC