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Of Petrushkin!, Ron Charach’s last book, The Globe & Mail wrote: “These poems remind us how effective narrative and anecdote can be in poetry. They owe more to Chekhov and I.B. Singer than to Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Charach’s use of language is not dazzling; it is unobtrusive and utilitarian because his goal—something rare nowadays—is to say something about the human condition. And he says it with a voice notable for its compassion and humour.”

In his new collection, Dungenessque, Charach builds on his strength as a storyteller, infusing his poems with the metaphoric intensity that characterized his first book, The Big Life Painting. One by one, the matrices of our identity—physical, sexual, relational and cultural—are shown to be as pitiable and as strangely noble as the bold character armour that conceals them. Dungenessque is a compelling study of pride, shame and redemption. With the insight of a practising therapist and the skill of a surgeon, Charach removes the outer shell that protects us from each other to explore those vulnerable areas in which the embattled self resides. Dungenessque is Charach’s sixth collection of poems.

Dupe goes under the hood of industrial capitalism where there is no deal, no compromise with capital, only complicity. The bearings, rods and shafts are running hot, the lubricant is breaking down, and shade–tree mechanic Jonathon Wilcke is fiddling with the timing chain. “More gas!” he shouts as flames leap from the carburetor. The dwell is finally set, Ford’s time management duplicator is idling rough yet the poems flow from the manifold.

Dupe takes up the formal concerns of Wilcke’s first book Pornograph and applies them to the body politic. The notion of musical notation guides the word on the page.

Karen Houle’s second book of poetry is a study of continuity, of being in process and of seeing through. With the diverse combination of influences that characterized her debut collection, Ballast (2000), Houle depicts friendships, siblings, marriage, parenting, breakups, work and loss through the oblique angles of biology, geology, forestry and philosophy.

Grouped in four conjugations–during, duration, endure, durable–the collection examines the temporal tricks of being in love and having home, of having presence in the here-and-now as well as in time before and after. Houle’s personal experiences inform her observations on ecology–beetles, trees, deer, frost, bees and fish–and these observations in turn inform back.

Alongside the carrot peelings and burst vacuum bags of daily life, slower processes tell stories about lifetimes, with shifting shorelines and rock formations charting longer silences and repeated visits to episodes long past. Giving equal reverence to the geologic structures and strata of household mess, During stands apart both for its precise language and imagery, and for its sustained, subtle telling of a life in progress.

“In the American Rephotographic Survey,” says Houle, “Mark Klett and other major American photographers went to the exact locales of famous, iconic American landscape photographs, like Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘Falls of the Yosemite from Glacier Rock, No. 36, 1872’, and took another photograph a whole century after the original images were made. The photos reveal that our expectations about what happens during the passage of that amount of time are often dead wrong. In some photos, one can’t even tell that one is at the same starting point: whole frames of reference are gone. In other cases, though, nothing much looked any different. And in still other cases, the natural landscape actually seemed richer, greener, less human-touched than the original sites. In my poetry, I want to do with words the same kind of complexifying: taking a pretty miserable starting point, and spin out, aurally and lyrically, a wider band of possibility of what could follow from that miserable start. Or, alternately, take a placid or banal opening vista and show the processes of decay or creepiness start to colonize that pretty space. When I went to see Klett in Tempe, Arizona, in February of 2007 he showed me 8 × 10 inch black and whites from his recent Time Studies (2006) series. Mark said to me, of this work: I wanted to try to show what a moment looks like, to record the duration of time. I found that to be a pretty fair description of what I think I’m doing in these poems: trying to get the ‘feel’ of time, a sharp piercing moment, a straight stretch of one-lane history, a seemingly endless debacle. I hope that the reader is confounded, contradicted. I hope sometimes she finds her expectations confirmed; comes away from a poem knowing she knows something about how things tend to happen. But also I hope she stumbles, at moments, into an entirely other, unexpected outcome. Caught sound asleep in pessimism, may she wake up, remembering the world around her is also capable of resilience, repair, beauty.”