Ever since the CBC Anthology programme featured Yvonne Trainer’s “Manyberries” poems while she was still an undergraduate, her work has attracted readers and listeners to a new and distinctive voice. The interests of these poems are intensely human: the observations acute; the language deceptively simple, forged from common speech. Trainer is close to her audience — a wonderful performer of her work — and makes memorable the drama of everyday events, a poetry of confirmation, of shared surprise and wonder. Drawing from her roots in Alberta prairie life, she is also a directly autobiographical poet, capable of rendering places and people with special attention, often from the wise perspective of a child.

In Landscape Turned Sideways poems from Trainer’s three previously published collections are brought together with recent work, offering readers a representative volume of her first decade as a published poet.