NNELS Upgrade

Shortlisted for the 2003 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and for the 2003 City of Saskatoon Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards) Hilary Clark's newest volume of poems shelters a world of stories and poems, of the tricks of language that are the dearest home of a writer.

Sue Sinclair is the direct inheritor of the great early 20th Century German poet, Rilke: she possesses intense lyrical vision, steeped in wonder at the existence of the world, and a kind of grief at our inability to lose ourselves in it completely. Her perception is acutely focused and rigorous; and she is acutely self-aware. She is not afraid of words like “beauty” or “being,” yet, because of the intensity of her vision, she never uses them as clichés. Her gift for metaphor is astonishing and may remind some readers of the young Roo Borson.

Winner of the 1992 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (QSPELL, now the Quebec Writers Federation) and shortlisted for the 1991 Pat Lowther Award Naomi Guttman's first collection of poems marks the appearance of a deeply emotional, highly intelligent new voice. Its theme is intimacy -- ours, especially women's, experience of intimacy in many forms, how it marks us, how we long for it, the ways in which it is both our fulfilment and our undoing.

A book of lyrics, fragmented, extended, and recovered, which read as a single long poem. The Luskville Reductions records a year in the life of a small Quebec town and the marriage that disintegrates there. While a book about loss, it is also a book about the state of becoming that coexists with change, the imbalance that for a time makes everything lucid, all the details adding up to much more than only an "us." The visible goes beyond mere facts in these poems, transformed into the deeply seen - and therefore sacred.

A turbulent, celebratory flight from an accomplished witness and journeyman. Antony Di Nardo's third collection of poems occupies the air between Canada and Lebanon, viewer and painting, victim and triggerman, reader and page. Blending a bohemian ebullience with a reporter's obligation to witness, the poems in Roaming Charges are a heady and celebratory bouquet of jet fuel, camaraderie and muezzin music. They look long and hard at their subjects, but also speak of the trails those subjects leave across the skies.

No postmodern gimmickry, no tricks except all the old ones that every good poet must learn: these lucid, evocative poems put the reader so clearly in the picture that you taste the blackberries of your childhood, shiver at the chill of rainwater down your neck in a western forest, or rake the dust from your hair as you trudge home from the Trojan War. Ross Leckie can capture the fleeting moments when we fully enter the world and believe we belong.

Shortlisted for the 2007 Trillium Book Award for Poetry Ecologically aware poems, hardwired to the intellect and the heart in equal measure. Adam Dickinson's poems, with firm intellectual bite and imaginative scope, reach fresh levels of poetic -- and ecological -- awareness. Sometimes reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, sometimes of Christopher Dewdney, and with the ghost of Foucault always in attendance, they ply a language that is cool and precise on the surface to open into the deep resonance of geologic time.

Reading John Reibetanz, one is struck with the way language, closely attended to, kept oiled and sharp, can give experience back its bite. And conversely, how experience can be the whetstone for language, chastening its presumptions and requiring from it fresh exactitudes of music and insight. Whether the subject is a cord of wood, a painting, or the New York Times (deeply and dancingly read) John Reibetanz brings a nearly invisible craft into close attunement with the details of life, hearkening with words. Again and again the glass slipper fits the foot.

Poems about the unexpected and often wry coincidences language lends to life. In Could be, each poem is a moment of engaged and isolated attention, prodding language, relationships, the mundane aspects of daily life, friendships and art. It asks how we use words, how we shape them and are in turn shaped by them. In many ways, then, this book is about how we construct our world through language, and how language unexpectedly shifts the terms on us. It is wry, funny, moving and at times disturbing.

Much of this poised and luminous book is rooted in an idea of epiphany, an aesthetic of everyday incarnation; not the sudden and profound manifestation of essence or meaning, but the smaller steps taken toward it. The moments in which, as Joyce writes, “the soul of the commonest object…seems to us radiant.” If epiphanies are for theologians, perhaps the little steps towards them are for poets like Eve Joseph, and for all of us who attempt to see beyond the names we give things to the names they give themselves.