Garden

A rock-littered backyard in east-end Ottawa slowly becomes a garden in Monty Reid’s looping cycle and re-cycle of anti-paradisial poems. With his companion species, the shovel, Reid digs and un-digs, turning up the playful, the prickly, and the dangerous. Garden is yet another example of Reid’s original vision and restlessly independent voice.

AUTHOR

Monty Reid

Born in Saskatchewan, Monty Reid worked at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller before moving to Ottawa in 1999 to become Director of Exhibition Services at the Canadian Museum of Nature. Disappointment Island (2006) won the Lampman-Scott Award and was shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award. Reid has also won three Stephan G. Stephansson Awards for Poetry (Alberta Literary Awards) and been nominated three times for the Governor-General’s Award. The Luskville Reductions is his 14th book.

Reviews

“As every gardener knows, the garden has a mind of its own. And when the gardener is a poet with a mind as signature as that of Monty Reid, vegetables, ideas, weeds, poems and jack-o-lanterns come together in a profusion of encounters that, far from paradisical, are as complicated, unruly and irreplaceable as life itself. Life is this inconceivable cabbage patch, says Reid, and no reader of this book will wish it otherwise; ostensibly about a garden, these poems are about what it means to be human.”—Mary Ruefle