> POETRY
Renaissance Normcore By Adèle Barclay Nightwood Editions/Harbour Publishing, 112 pages, $18.95
“Normcore” is a fashion trend that’s seen as anti-fashion, a style of comfortable unisex dressing that eschews designer labels. In poetic terms, presumably, it’s meant to imply foregoing elaborate figurative language in favour of plainer diction. Thus, the poems in Adèle Barclay’s second collection are conversational and channel a confessional voice, as the West Coast poet puzzles over “home, family and personal foundations.” Power dynamics in relationships, queer desire and emotional tumult are refracted through a sensibility that is witty, sardonically funny at times and touchingly candid. “I think that life marks us/and sometimes I want to choose/the location of the scars,” she writes in one poem. Her use of more metaphorical turns of phrase is sparing but evocative, as in “Self-Portrait of 2018,” where she writes, “the world is rattling as it always does/ half my body dissociates and the other/ half makes a pact with the ground/to gather resources for the storm.”
Crow Gulch By Douglas Walbourne-Gough Icehouse/Goose Lane Editions, 78 pages, $19.95
The title of Douglas Walbourne-Gough’s impressive debut collection refers to a makeshift settlement that sprang up close to Corner Brook, N.L., during construction of the town’s pulp-and-paper mill in 1923. In his introduction, he notes that “many of the families who settled here were of Indigenous ancestry.” The book is in part an excavation of family roots (he describes himself as “mixed/ adopted M’ikmaw”), but it’s also a gritty, multifaceted portrayal of working-class life and an exploration of the role of place in forming identity. Walbourne- Gough conjures a landscape of harsh terrain in these vivid, image-driven poems. As he puts it in one poem, “What if the land you want to break is bedrock?/ Bald fields of stone flowered with boulders, kissed/by bog and moss less than knee-deep.” Elsewhere, he pays tribute to his grandparents, particularly his feisty grandmother, Ella, who is described as “sinew and bird bones./Cords of her hands like spruce roots.”
Sotto Voce By Maureen Hynes Brick Books, 107 pages, $20
In the opening poem of her fifth book of poetry, Maureen Hynes presents the disquieting image of a clock face, its hands torn off, “abandoned … to the weeds” on the shores of the Humber River. Elsewhere, the Toronto poet writes of an hourglass: “Once the hour is splintered/into shards on the floor, what can it hold?” A preoccupation with time echoes throughout this meditative collection; in particular, there’s an urgent sense that, in the face of climate change, humanity is running out of time. “The unseen is what will undo us, not so much/ what is out of sight but what we refuse to see,” she writes. These are watchful poems, with an eye on world affairs (war, the refugee crisis and “the shrinking canvas/of glacier & snow”). But Hynes also keeps a lookout for things that give her hope, in poems celebrating “momentary happiness,” nature’s beauty and poetry’s “escape hatches.”
McLuhan’s Canary By Bruce Meyer Guernica Editions, 84 pages, $20
“I find myself asking questions/about the voyage from life to death,” Bruce Meyer writes in his latest collection. A professor of poetry and Canadian literature at Georgian College in Barrie, he has published more than 60 books, ranging from poetry to literary journalism; in this introspective collection, he muses on the power of imagination and on mortality. There is much about the passage of time, what lasts and what doesn’t. In the first poem, Meyer envisions the future as a snow-covered field, a blankness “beyond the familiar and the forgetful.” He frequently draws on traditional tropes and imagery, such as light as a symbol of the life force, and his lines are gracefully cadenced. Underlying many poems is an urge to seize what is fleeting; as he puts it, “words I cannot find fast enough/to describe the arms of a snowflake/before it melts beneath my breath.”