Midgic is a small community on the edge of New Brunswick’s Tantramar marshes, thought by historian William Francis Ganong to have been named for a Mi’kmaq descriptive for “a point of highland into a marsh.” In this new suite of poems, Douglas Lochhead displays the sure, grid-laying eye of the archeologist, mapping each small detail in his concise lyric shorthand. Like Lochhead’s High Marsh Road (1980) and Dykelands (1989), Midgic employs a method of repeated encounters with a specific place to reveal over time a rhythm and logic otherwise invisible in both the landscape and the visitant. Lochhead’s gift lies in his ability to amplify the truths of the greater world while speaking of a single place in whispers.