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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.”

Is this life a route or a destination?

Alyda Faber’s assured début examines the ties that bind us to one another and to the Earth we inhabit, and asks the question, What is left of us when we are gone?

In the quiet and unsettling poems of Dust or Fire, Faber speaks from the grief following death to explore the meaning of love and family. She is not afraid of gaps and ellipses, finding music in the silences. Her unflinching gaze explores the imperfections of our fleeting existence, our ambitions and relationships, our flawed humanity. Documenting the search for home, the longing to belong, to love and be loved, she turns to the ways love can curve toward pain, how we carelessly hurt one another, but also how we find the grace to forgive and carry on. Dust or Fire is a moving collection, at once grounding and uplifting.

Award-winning poet Barry Dempster’s latest collection embraces the fragility of life and the bitterness of endings. Ghosts of his father and mother haunt the pages and friends face battles with cancer, some losing, some not, while the poet himself is all too aware of the passage of time on his own frame. This is not a gentle book, but in his wrestling with death Dempster gives voice to the pain that many others have felt. Yet with his deft turn of phrase and fresh imagery he also startles his readers, and leaves them questioning their own expectations of life and its alternative.

In a letter to his brothers in 1818, John Keats remarked on a curious expression in vogue among his friends: “they call drinking deep dying scarlet.” The poems in this collection, inspired by Keats’ misspelling of “dyeing,” explore the ways in which we drink deep from life, searching for beauty and passion despite a melancholy awareness of our own mortality.Poised between praise and lamentation, Dying Scarlet moves from the experiences of the poet’s grandfather in the trenches of World War One, to the fate of an obscure English poet in the Elizabethan age, to the present-day journey of a sockeye salmon; from the Russia of Anna Akhmatova to the Manitoba of Margaret Laurence. Autumnal and contemplative, these are poems of love, of memory, of home, of dying – and, most profoundly, of life.