With Blue Himalayan Poppies, Jay Ruzesky collects his best poetry of the past seven years. Acclaimed as one of Canada’s most interesting and innovative contemporary poets for his first two books, Am I Glad to See You (Thistledown, 1992) and the highly praised and influential Painting the Yellow House Blue (Anansi, 1994), Ruzesky has produced his best collection yet.Ruzesky applies his fully matured and honed skills to the creation of a stunning fresco that spans the universal dilemma of life itself: the haunting and invigorating importance of family and lifelong friends (“the way the sudden memory of someone/ surprises the mind”), both the comfort and the solitude brought about by love, the ever-present desire of escape and the never ending circle of the routine, destruction and most importantly, regeneration.In Blue Himalayan Poppies, a borrowed book becomes a stolen token of intimate love, a looming mushroom cloud signifies a teenage couple’s belief in the overriding power of human vitality, an empty hotel room turns into a scene of lust so intense and unbridled that it could only be a product of a maid’s imagination and a common household is transformed into a glowing Garden of Eden by a sidewalk chalk artist. Jay Ruzesky’s exploration of everyday life is a boon and a treasure to us all; he offers the big picture, in which he is just as likely to inform little plastic men found under the couch that “grief/ is the other side/ of the pleasure your faces speak of” as he is to relate the astonishment of looking into the night sky and realizing “Oh my God, it’s full of stars.”