Published on Friday, Nov. 27, 2009 3:53PM EST Last updated on Monday, Nov. 30, 2009 2:38PM EST
To read the Globe's review of the books listed here, click on the title.
SPIRIT ENGINE
By John Donlan, Brick Books, 75 pages, $18
A brilliant wordsmith, Donlan writes circles around many of his contemporaries. He creates an ultra-campestral world where all remains redolent with the radiant sheen of life writ lush with largesse and a kind of courage to express both humour and humility through deeply moving meditations that leave “the mutter and ache/ and fuss of self” (as well as ego) in the rubble and ruin of so-called contemporary civilization. Judith Fitzgerald
LISTENING
By Margaret Avison, McClelland & Stewart, 80 pages, $17.99
The radiant authority of Avison’s art, everywhere on display in this affective as well as effective volume, derives from a life spent observing, assimilating, listening and, most crucially, taking note of all that fills her senses. She opens her heart to the universe and, in so doing, finds fulfilment within its wondrous and often incomprehensibly wicked ways. Judith Fitzgerald
THE SENTINEL
By A.F. Moritz, Anansi, 88 pages, $18.95
The prolific Moritz is incapable of putting a metrical foot wrong; he has a velvety, seductive technique through which we’re immersed in a poetic dreamtime, especially memories of a lost civilization that was decayed even at its height. Moritz is deft at creating alternative universes and can summon ravishing lines such as “the sort of root a canoe’s hull or the belly of a tern/ offers to water, moving on its own pressure and soft shadow.” This collection won Canadian half of the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize. Fraser Sutherland
PIGEON
By Karen Solie, Anansi, 94 pages, $18.95
Canadians talk about the weather, we obsess about the landscape. More than a dozen poems here address ways we inhabit, and often overuse, our natural environment, specifically rivers and lakes. As much as Pigeon sings with metaphor and language-love, it is also infused with a subtle formality that feels like listening to the echoing footsteps of someone walking by deep in thought. Meg Walker
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