BARB CAREY
BLACKBIRD SONG By Randy Lundy University of Regina Press, 90 pages, $19.95 “The prairie asks you to look closely if you want to see what’s here,” the Cree poet Randy Lundy remarked in an interview with the literary magazine Event. True to that principle, the lyrical meditations in his third collection are steeped in observation of the Saskatchewan landscape and “immersed in the turning seasons.” But they aren’t just poems of evocative description: through metaphor, Lundy deftly links the outer world with introspection. There’s the sense of a poet calling himself to account, and haunted by memories; “all the holes you have dug/in your heart to bury your dead,” as he puts it. These are deeply searching poems of quiet but affecting power.
STEREOBLIND By Emma Healey Anansi, 112 pages, $19.95 The title of Emma Healey’s intriguing second poetry collection refers to lacking depth perception. The Toronto poet has been diagnosed with the condition; seeing images as “brief, unstable composites” leads her to metaphysical concerns about the nature of perception: what gives us a stable sense of identity, how our relationships change us, what it’s like “being inside, outside, both, alone.” Healey’s prose poems read like journal entries, though there’s often a beguiling turn to the surreal. She writes of experiencing time as “a stack of transparencies, all printed with the/ same picture, layered overtop each other, slipping apart, out/ of order.”
RECKON By Steve McOrmond Brick Books, 72 pages, $20 “Things are always in the process/of never being the same again,” Steve McOrmond writes in Reckon. The Toronto poet takes stock of various aspects of modern life in his aptly named fourth collection, including consumer capitalism, the alienating effect of technology and the bewildering pace of change. McOrmond’s eye is on our collective fate, and in “We: Current Exhibition” the image of Wile E. Coyote plunging off a cliff serves as a cautionary symbol of where our world may be headed. But elsewhere McOrmond hints at a hopeful view, using snowflakes as a metaphor for humankind’s potential to change its course.
LISTEN BEFORE TRANSMIT By Dani Couture Buckrider Books/ Wolsak and Wynn, 90 pages, $18 In one poem in Listen Before Transmit, Dani Couture describes the sensation in a phantom limb as a “slim, neural kite string that ties not/to the lost bolt of ankle, but transmission failure.” The book’s title is a radiocommunications term, referring to the fact that transmitters are programmed to establish they are in a radio environment before broadcasting. Connection over a distance is also what Couture explores and interrogates in her ambitious fourth collection. Space exploration is a recurring motif, and this inquisitive and inventive Toronto poet enjoys “speculating on our speculations.”