Poems of love and protest combine in Claude McKay’s piercingly relevant 2022 collection Harlem Shadows
These poems testify to the range of McKay's emotive field.
“We is all we have”: Science, nature, and politics intertwine in Derek Webster’s National Animal
The poems in National Animal do not cleave to unidirectional pieties about nature or the resilience of humankind.
“Mondays are bait days”: The harsh landscape of Chris Bailey’s rigorously unsentimental second collection
In Bailey's case, his subject is virtually inexhaustible, because the setting is inexhaustible.
And then there were none: Griffin Poetry Prize unveils a five-book shortlist devoid of Canadians
If deep-pocketed institutions and organizations – and prizes – in this country aren't doing enough to support and elevate Canadian poetry, then it's up to the rest of us.
David Stones, Stratford, Ontario’s first poet laureate, has plans to bring poetry to the people
"The poet laureate role to me is to bring poetry to the people and the people to poetry."
Horrible landlords and abrasive seas: The sombre and fleetingly optimistic vision of Karen Solie’s Wellwater
If there is any obvious hope to be found in the sombre and desolate poems on offer in this collection, it is in the perseverance of nature in the face of violence and peril.
Americans dominate the Griffin Poetry Prize longlist amid threats of annexation from the U.S. government
Fully seven of the ten longlisted titles are published by American houses.
John Ford and Clyde Barrow on the road to Key West: The rugged melancholy of Michael Blouin’s Hard Electric
These are not a young man's verses; they are the ruminations of someone in the twilight of middle-age.
Beyond death and grief, Molly Peacock finds colour and calm in her new poetry collection, The Widow’s Crayon Box
There is ambiguity here, but also a plaintive recognition of very human emotions that are often denied or ignored by people frightened by their complexity or contradictions.
The worlds of therapy and nature operate in tandem in Melanie Siebert’s long poem Signal Infinities
Siebert's empathetic approach to her material is admirable and she has the capacity for cutting observation.