All Books

Over the past decade, countless young Canadians, lured by adventure and the promise of well-paid work, have travelled to Asia to teach English in the many private language schools that have sprung up there. Although these schools provide new opportunities for Asians by opening up Western language and culture, those who have travelled to Asia to teach have as often found themselves the students. Alison Smith’s poems chronicle her experience teaching English in Japan, exploring this cross-cultural exchange in the clear, unadorned narrative voice that typified her debut collection.

Life is full of those moments, good and bad, that define you, make you whole, and provide direction to your journey. Richard Scarsbrooks brilliant debut collection of poetry, Outtakes, uncovers the moments that we keep hidden deep inside us, that steer us through the currents and eddies of the everyday.

Gary Geddes’s ancestors fished herring off the Orkney Islands, but his own fishing takes a different form. His new poetry collection, Skaldance, weaves in and out of the history of the islands like the wind, ocean, and invaders that have shaped the unique Norse-Scottish landscape and culture of the Orkadians.

An outsider with a stake in these remote northern islands, Geddes takes on the role of Skald, the poet of Old Norse tradition, who reports on love, politics, and the past. With wry, quiet humour or bold theatricality, Geddes establishes connections with a people and a land where his forebears lived long ago. Neolithic voices, Viking graffiti, and a fourteenth-century Venetian voyager all have their say in the polyphony of speakers created by Geddes.

So, too, do Armada refugees, Hudson’s Bay Company recruits, and Italian POWs in these breathtaking poems that transcend period and time. Like the Scottish film Breaking the Waves, the tragic events of these poems are made bearable by moments of black humour. Yet, Geddes’s long narrative poems also reverse the process, disarming readers with laughter before delivering the emotional punch.

Whether light-hearted or tragic, ironically detached or passionately engaged, the poems in Skaldance are deeply felt, intelligent, witty, and exquisitely crafted.

An elegy to and celebration of British Columbia’s second-longest river, one at the centre of contemporary conversations about resource extraction and northern geographies, Skeena is an assemblage of voices, stories and histories both about the river and from the river’s perspective. As a single poetic narrative spanning more than ninety pages, this second collection of poetry by award-winning poet Sarah de Leeuw follows a Canadian tradition of long poems, weaving together poetic rendering of the river’s perceptions with archival material that includes highway signs and historical newspapers, scientific reports and local lore, geological surveys and tourist websites. Mirroring a river’s complex tributary structure and rendered in highly concentrated imagistic language and experimental description, Skeena is a poly-vocal watershed of poetry, a book that unflinchingly demands humans understand the power of a river, the life and world of the Skeena River.