All Books

George Sipos hears the frog song at two in the morning and wonders if it is passion that drives it or the loneliness of spring. In another poem, the wet leaves of fall are described in language that cuts two ways: “I work the rake, &#47 you the wheelbarrow. when we get tired we will change.”

With quiet humour, he writes of nature, the land, and the tasks of an ordinary day. Alive with sublety, The Glassblowers quietly turns images and metaphors the way we might turn a small stone between our thumb and fingers to see its facets and colours.

Marilyn Gear Pilling has written, “For me, to pay close attention to life, both my own and the lives of those around me – to witness and document it, find the larger meaning in it, communicate it to others – is to honour it, to make the most of this little blink of time in which we are here. ” In her sixth poetry collection, The gods of East Wawanosh, Pilling continues this work of loving witness. The long title sequence documents scenes in the life of a Huron County family still in thrall to the ancestral farm — a father and brother who worked in the city but gave a lifetime of weekends to upkeep the land that “tugged at an unseen part of them.”. Pilling memorializes a way of life that was on its way out: the end-of-summer community picnic, pies baked at six in the morning in wood ovens, mothers and daughters walking in “warm golden water” on the hard-packed river bottom, men and boys arriving after a hot day’s threshing; the continuity of generations, family hopes, conflicts and tragedies lived out in a setting that “both shattered and held together” their world. In the book’s second half, Pilling assumes the role of observer and listener, recording voices of others whose paths have crossed hers – neighbours, new immigrants, people encountered while travelling – as they relate stories of danger and escape, of extremity, of personal circumstance and cultural obligation. Clear-eyed, curious, compassionate, she meditates on our mortality and the light in which it casts both our longing for the ideal and our embrace of the real.

Poems that occupy the difficult territory of contemporary crisis with great candour and trenchant wit.

Steve McOrmond’s unflinching take on contemporary life, with its saturnine candour and ironic focus, may remind readers of the anti-poetry of Europeans like Zbigniew Herbert: intense, humanistic and deeply sceptical of inflationary gestures or stagy rhetoric. Shedding illusions, but equally refusing the consolations of despair, McOrmond’s well-tempered satire is carried home on its own crisp music.

The title poem has, as it narrative background, the encounter between the narrator and a young door-to-door missionary, one who sets his worldly and jaded scepticism against her innocence and faith. “The Good News about Armageddon” poses questions that are difficult and durable (“In these hours of prolific / doubt, how will we acquit ourselves?”), as well as those that are topical (“Are Paris Hilton’s 15 minutes over yet?”) and probes with accurate wit (“We are an argument / for unintelligent design”). This is essential poetry for our time — astute, informed, bitingly satirical, yet grounded in its quest for words that, like Cordelia’s, reverb no hollowness.