Like its eponymous totem creature, the poems in Octopus are canny, slippery, and metamorphic. As apt to channel the confessionalism of Anne Sexton as the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature poetry of Ted Hughes, Warner’s voice ranges freely from the colloquial to the baroque. Over the past fifteen years, by harbouring and honouring such fraught tensions, Warner has been building one of the most taut and original bodies of work in Canadian literature. In Octopus we have him at his best.