Eilean Ni Chuilleanain has apparently been accused by one past reviewer of lacking “killer instinct”, whatever that is supposed to mean when one is crafting poetry. (At any rate, Ni Chuilleanain turns that phrase to striking advantage in one of the most vibrant pieces in this collection.) The poems in The Sun-fish are dense, demand undivided attention and are often understated, sometimes to a fault. However, Ni Chuilleanain’s simultaneously grounded and transcendent verse pays off with fresh, sometimes pointed insights into human resilience.

Deserving winner of the 2010 International Griffin Poetry Prize, The Sun-fish even shades into the acerbic with selections such as the delightfully sly “Vertigo” (“How did such smart women acquire such a mother?”). “The Sister” is a haunting selection, which Ni Chuilleanain read at the Griffin Poetry Prize readings in the spring of 2010:

Reflective reading will reward the patient reader of this deceptively slim but surprisingly rich and deep collection.

The poems in John Glenday’s Grain are unassumingly stoic and plainspoken, ranging from wistful and tender to self-deprecating to harrowing (“Song” and “Grain” have, unfortunately, particularly unforgettable images). Even when he jolts the reader, though, all of the work in this succinct volume has a strong underpinning of humanity and wry compassion.

Grain was recently shortlisted for the 2010 International Griffin Poetry Prize. The judges’ citation captures well the essence of this deservingly nominated work:

“[Glenday] listens carefully to the language he works in. [His poems are] also playful: a tin can, a peculiar fish, invented translations, made-up saints all can suggest poems. It’s refreshing to discover a poet whose work is earthly, full of rivers and hills and islands, but where old ideas like ‘love’ and ‘soul’ have not been banished. Grain is the work of an unhurried craftsman; John Glenday has made poems of understated integrity and humanity.”

Karen Solie’s poems have a voice that is a potent amalgam of emotions and perspectives. In that voice is the spiritual grit and respect for the natural world of someone raised on a farm. In it, too, is the cynical resilience of someone who has chosen to be an urban dweller, and who manages to celebrate what is harsh and quirky about that environment. It’s all tempered with revelatory sensitivity and tenderness, often prompted by chance collisions of those natural and less natural worlds. “Migration” – movingly dedicated to her aunt when Solie read it at the Griffin Poetry Prize readings in Toronto this spring – is a standout.

“Pigeon” richly deserves its Griffin Poetry Prize, Pat Lowther Award and Trillium Book Award distinctions. Solie’s body of work, while still modest in numbers of collections, constitutes a high watermark in Canadian poetry.

P.K. Page took on the stylistically challenging formal glosa form for each poem in Coal and Roses, which was to become her last poetry collection before her death in January, 2010 at the age of 93. As described at the opening of the book:

The glosa form opens with a quatrain, borrowed from another poet, that is then followed by four ten-line stanzas terminating with the lines of the initial passage in consecutive order. The sixth and ninth lines rhyme with the borrowed tenth. Glosas were popular in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries among poets attached to the Spanish court.

That Page would tackle such a labyrinthine approach to poetic expression when others would be long retired from their chosen career or metier attests to her abiding intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for her craft. That she could apply a form that perhaps sounds fusty and overly complex to fresh subject matter, in varied and lively styles, exploring a range of traditions, is revelatory. That she could take as her inspirations and starting points such diverse poetic voices as Margaret Cavendish, Ted Hughes, Don McKay, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Jorge Luis Borges, Dionne Brand, Anna Akhmatova and more is breathtaking, offering a vibrant primer for those wishing to expand their poetic education and horizons. That this collection could go on to share the Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist with Kate Hall, a young poet who was once mentored by Page, is a gorgeously bittersweet tribute to a respected literary grande dame.

The stunning beautiful Coal and Roses by P.K. Page is a gift to all poetry lovers, a testament to the life of an extraordinary and generous artist, and an essential literary work.

Eunoia by Canadian experimental poet Christian Bok is the 74th of a series of titles selected by writer Yann Martel to provide to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to encourage an appreciation of the arts and literature in particular in the PM, and to also help Harper with his stillness and thoughtfulness. Martel has regularly sent books from a wide range of literary traditions to Harper. Since he started this initiative in April 2007, Martel has devoted a Web site to the reading list and to his kind, considered and often poignant covering letters with each volume. (All of his letters can be read at http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/. They are also now in printed form, in a book entitled, not surprisingly, What is Stephen Harper Reading?)

Martel’s thoughtful persistence in this quest is both heartwrenching and highly commendable. He has never received a direct acknowledgement from Harper, and only some fairly form-letter responses from Harper’s staff. He has also received a response from Industry Minister Tony Clement, but it wasn’t directly related to any of Martel’s book selections.

Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, became the bestselling poetry book of all time in Canada, and recently came out in a second edition with new material. The Griffin judges cited the work as follows: “Christian Bök has made an immensely attractive work from those “corridors of the breath” we call vowels, giving each in turn its dignity and manifest, making all move to the order of his own recognition and narrative. Both he and they are led to delightfully, unexpected conclusions as though the world really were what we made of it. As we are told at the outset, “Eunoia, which means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels.” Here each speaks with persistent, unequivocal voice, all puns indeed intended.” Could Stephen Harper benefit from some “beautiful thinking”? It seems Yann Martel thought so.

Some reviewers dismissed Eunoia as a clever parlor trick, not really a work of artistic merit. Having read it, I confess that while I marvelled at the discipline involved in creating the work, it left me kind of cold at times. However, having seen Bok present it – live and on video – there is no denying the passion he applies to this and all his work.

Meredith Quartermain’s “Matter” has some interesting echoes amongst its selections: Sylvia Legris’ fascination with birds and birdsong, Don McKay’s veneration of the natural world, Erin Moure’s sprightly dissection of the construction of words. Quartermain’s premise of examining words as if they were species and genera is intriguing, but seems to prove overwhelming over the course of this slim volume. Her concern with sticking to the constructs and constraints of the theme of physical and etymological taxonomies regularly bogs her poems down. The results are just too dense and intricate at times. When Quartermain relaxes and just lets the words flow, as she does in “Matter 18: An Albumen of Absence” and in the whimsical “Life List of Words” at the end of the volume, the premise retains its charm but becomes much more accessible.

Margaret Atwood’s poetic reimagining of the hardscrabble life of Susanna Moodie, a British settler who emigrated to Canada in the 1830s, is vivid unto itself. It groups Moodie’s experiences into three sets of poems: the first covers her arrival in Canada and primitive subsistence on a farm near what became Peterborough, Ontario, the second covers her somewhat more civilized existence in the town of Belleville, and the third is actually a posthumous set of reflections that concludes with her spirit inhabiting that of an old woman on a bus travelling along St Clair Avenue in Toronto in the late 1960s. Throughout, Atwood gives Moodie a grittier and more emotional voice than what comes through in Moodie’s prim accounts in “Roughing it in the Bush” and her subsequent memoirs.

While Atwood’s poetic account of Moodie’s adventures and experiences is vibrant by itself, it is further enhanced and animated by the typographic and graphical innovations of artist Charles Pachter, a longtime friend and collaborator of Atwood’s. Interestingly, Atwood and Pachter originally applied for a grant in 1970 to allow him to design a special edition of the collection of poems, but the application was turned down by the Canada Council. Atwood went ahead and got the poems published by Oxford University Press, but she and Pachter held onto the hope that they could one day collaborate on a more fully realized rendition incorporating his ideas and work. Several years later, the University of Toronto Library financed a venture that saw Pachter and two Spanish master printers, Abel and Manuel Bello-Sanchez, bring Atwood’s poems to life in a 120-copy limited edition that combined complex silkscreening, calligraphic and typographical effects. In the early 1980s, examples of this unique work were exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. By the early 1990s, it had also been translated into French.

Finally, in 1997, an edition was produced capturing the original text and graphics, with an account by Charles Pachter and a foreword by noted University of Ottawa English professor David Staines. This edition effectively encapsulates the history and collective heft of this work, and puts it in context with Staines’ enthusiastic framing of the work as a uniquely Canadian livre d’artiste. Topping it all off is Pachter’s ebullient account of being inspired by the genius of his friend Margaret Atwood to produce a work of genius of his own, to which the poems are inextricably linked.

Well crafted but depressing, sometimes verging on sinister … but when you hear Wright read his work aloud (which I’m glad I had the opportunity to do), the poems come across as wry and almost self-effacing.

I am loving Kleinzahler’s jaunty juxtaposition of high-falutin’ references with down-to-earth commentary. Having heard him read and give speeches, it’s great to hear his voice in my head as I’m reading his words. I go back to this wonderful, funny, moving speech of his all the time:

http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/awards-and-poets/speeches/august-kleinzahler-2005-awards/

One of my favourite poems from “Rapid City” is thematically similar to Kleinzahler’s “The Strange Hours Travellers Keep”, about the disorientation that travellers feel in places like indistinguishable hotel rooms:

On waking in a room and not knowing where one is

There is a bureau and there is a wall
and no one is beside you.
Beyond the curtains only silence,
broken now and again by a car or truck.
And if you are very still
an occasional drip from the faucet.
Such are the room’s acoustics
it is difficult to place exactly where from.
Also, the tick of the clock.
It is very dark.
There exist all manner of blacks,
lampblack, for instance,
much favored by the ancients,
so deep and so dense
and free of any shade of gray
or brown. But this,
this dark is of another order,
compounded of innumerable shadows,
a weave of them.
One is able to make out shapes.
It is not restful, to be like this, here,
nor is it a fearful place.
In a moment or two you will know
exactly where you are,
on which side of the door,
your wallet, your shoes,
and what today you’ll have to do.

Cities each have a kind of light,
a color even,
or set of undertones
determined by the river or hills
as well as by the stone
or their countless buildings.
I cannot yet recall what city this is I’m in.
It must be close to dawn.

Shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize (www.griffinpoetryprize.com), “Short Haul Engine” was Karen Solie’s first poetry collection. The voice in many of the poems is that of someone who is tough, self reliant but also lonely and wistful. (Phrases like “heart wagging its little tail” are surprising and touching.) The fresh attention to the mundane details of life – driving and engaging in other activities in a car, watching an in-flight movie, drinking shots – is at times almost startling.

From the poem Sturgeon:

On an afternoon mean as a hook we hauled him
up to his nightmare of us and laughed
at his ugliness, soft sucker mouth opening,
closing on air that must have felt like ground glass,
left him to die with disdain
for what we could not consume.
And when he began to heave and thrash over yards of rock
to the water’s edge and, unbelievably, in,
we couldn’t hold him though we were teenaged
and bigger than everything. Could not contain
the old current he had for a mind, its pull,
and his body a muscle called river, called spawn.