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Diana Fitzgerald Bryden's second book of poetry, Clinic Day, (choreo)graphs the experiences and thoughts and feelings of three characters (The Secretary, The Surgeon, and a wanderer named -- not inaptly -- Blake), who perform a pas de trois of yearning and loss and occasional moments of grace. If at times the dance has a fevered quality, it is also, always, electrically alive and exquisitely shaped.

In her first book of poetry since The Small Words in My Body, which won the Pat Lowther Prize for 1990, Karen Connelly writes, in the tradition of the writer-adventurer, of vivid encounters and reflections abroad and at home, continuing her pursuit of "living knowledge of the world." These poems enact journeys of the body and heart with candour and sensuous grace, catching the very texture of human experience in the lithe, muscular lines which have a cat-like metaphorical reach.

This is Michael Kenyon’s third full-length collection of poems. His poetry and fiction have always been alert to the underside, the angularity of the outcast, those forced by temperament or predilection or circumstance to the fringes of middle class life. Here, it is insight itself that pushes the speakers closer to the edge. The world of these poems is dark: Kenyon names and owns our clear cuts, our overpopulation, our fossil-fueled rush to oblivion, the violence embedded in sexuality. This is a book of expanded elegy, clear-eyed, unflinching amid the wreckage of its loves.

A sequence exploring the bittersweet corners of motherhood.

Winner of the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize and of the 2003 CAA Jack Chalmers Poetry Award and Globe 100 book for 2003 In Margaret Avison's new poems, little pleasures are bound up with larger ones. Her slightest subjects -- beloved Toronto parks with their population of oaks, firs, squirrels, dogs, kids, even ants, and the minutest sighs of her contemporary urban soundscape -- all have their being within an immense composition that calls and hauls us to a largeness, a category-breaking "always unthinkable" beyond.

In Nora Gould’s one-of-a-kind debut, the Prairie itself is a central character: muse, mythic persona, the place of deepest solace and of deepest questioning. The poems focus with great firmness and technical command on the facts of daily life on the farm: impregnating cows, the neighbour kid picking off a coyote, cutting hay, getting water to the herd in a drought, dehorning. But Prairie anecdotalism this ain’t. What is breathtaking about this book is the relation between its exactness of observation and the grief, horror, and beauty that it documents.

Steven Price’s second collection is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from a Greek-style chorus of clever-minded, mischievous beings—half-ghost, half-muse—whose commentaries tormentingly egg the writer on.

Poems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on. E. Alex Pierce's voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. It's not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out. Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive.

John Donlan’s lyric work seeks the connection between lives—not just the life of a coyote and the life of a man, or the peaceful cacophony of a pond in summer and the life of the human listener—but between the life before birth, and the life after. He reveals the wilderness to us moment by moment, while simultaneously driving us back into our own nature—a process readers, lifted by Donlan’s imagery, rhythms, and insights, can only experience as pure pleasure. Here beauty is the engine that enspirits the mind, freeing us from contemporary despair and the illusion we’ve left nature behind.

Few artists (one thinks of Rilke and Hopkins) have presumed to evoke the spirit of embodied Nature. A. F. Moritz not only succeeds in thus animating a living world, but he deals with our human presence and assault on it with sympathy and a larger vision than the misanthropy such injuries easily summon. This is nature poetry with a difference: through Moritz's landscapes, from the abandoned industries of the Rust Belt to the decaying monuments of vanished civilization, move the vivid and engaging characters we have come to expect from this clear-eyed and open-hearted poet.