True Concessions charts the moments where beauty is glimpsed like a carnival through a crack in a fence. In verse inhabited by living toys and daylight ghosts, Craig Poile captivates his readers with texture and sound and a language grounded in the quotidian yet informed by tradition. There are no rules when making a poem that sings and shimmers.
“True Concessions is a book full of poems that float as lightly as a balloon tied to a toddler’s wrist, or, when they want to, stick like epoxy. Its language is deft and precise, its imagery keenly observed, and its themes poignant and humane. Like wings that lighten the feet, it turns the everyday dance into something unforgettable. Which is what this book is.”
– Jury statement, 2010 Ottawa Book Awards

“The poems in Craig Poile’s True Concessions are graceful, a perfectly smooth parallel-parking job, dexterous in the tight corners of both suburban and urban landscapes. Often he is at his best with things: suits laid out on the bed like ‘two black shovelfuls,’ balloons, blankets, phones. Poile thrives when attuned to small displacements, as in one of his poems, the sonnet ‘Place Royale,’ where the poses of chairs ‘revive what life was about / last night.’ We glean our place, Poile is saying, from cues hovering on a kind of sensory surface tension, which may or may not last. His prosody is strong, his voice assured. A fine collection.”
– Arc Poetry Magazine

“A quiet gem of a book, True Concessions is a reflective journey through the days and the demands of life in the middle years. … With their air of reluctant maturity, their thoughtfulness, their acceptance (and occasional resignation), they form up as a parade of concessions marching to the rhythms of life and the necessary realities of disappointment.”
– Ottawa Citizen

“Here is a poet that looks at things closely, and records them accurately. He does not easily yield to abstraction … His skill with phrasing can play the gently echoing against the percussive, as in ‘Voices that ache and affirm, like a phantom limb / News that comes like a bang in the ear. …’ This solid collection convinced me that Craig Poile has both craft and emotional range. I’ll be watching for his next book.”
– Globe and Mail Books Online

“Each of these poems urges the spirit to walk with the poetic voice and travel the inroads of pattern and imagery to where it will awaken a stark reality — how well each is conceived — not in a far-reaching language, but in the common voice of everyday. Tempted, for example, has ‘Noon, and the towers empty in one great flush …’ True Concessions is Poile’s second book of verse and a strong omen of much good to follow.”
– Daily Gleaner