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.
A Blog About Books and Reading
A Blog About Books and Reading
These poems testify to the range of McKay's emotive field.
The poems in National Animal do not cleave to unidirectional pieties about nature or the resilience of humankind.
In Bailey's case, his subject is virtually inexhaustible, because the setting is inexhaustible.
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.
"The poet laureate role to me is to bring poetry to the people and the people to poetry."
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.
Fully seven of the ten longlisted titles are published by American houses.
These are not a young man's verses; they are the ruminations of someone in the twilight of middle-age.
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.
Siebert's empathetic approach to her material is admirable and she has the capacity for cutting observation.