Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series – serie

Thyme clings, high / and away from the grazing and scents / the air.Island reality is interconnected with live-retrieved memories in which a nurse follows a violent patient into the northern Canadian bush, a migrant mother faces her new job as the village butcher, an Ojibway man is forced to walk a dangerous route home alone, teenagers loot the local dump to build their mother's wheelchair, and an electrician watches a woman play a grand piano on a ballfield.A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. By centring her experiential empathy on a history of racism and poverty, she guides us into better ways of being. Intimate reflections are contrasted with geopolitical and environmental concerns as Schönmaier's fierce intelligence focuses on what is most essential in our lives.The arc of this collection offers a rejuvenating meditation on the meaning of loss and love, highlighted by the lyric beauty of the writing.

I've lived the way a field is sometimes / a shelter for mice / or sometimes a source of game / for a hawkInspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide.The Tantramar Re-Vision charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, flights, and fears, be it through the woods, the wilds, the page, or the mind where "it's hard to admit / you are not to your taste." It questions an existence in which the inhuman thrives, ignorant of divinity, while the human psyche continues to search for answers as "life takes directions / away from" it. The Tantramar Marsh setting of John Thompson's Stilt Jack resonates with Irie's landscapes of birds, fish, plants, and wildlife, all still within reach yet part of a world where "wind carries sounds / it cannot hear."Insightful and meditative, The Tantramar Re-Vision is poetry of the inner self and the outside observer, a poetic testament to the ways literature creates its own landmarks and nature survives without knowing a word.

In the night her whitened toes / cold sole on his calf / between his palms he warms / a slender foot – / twig bones, taut skin.Jean Van Loon’s father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. The Geiger counter he brought home exposed her mother’s dinner plate as radioactive. Her childhood friend’s father sold cobalt bombs to the Soviet Union. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada’s Cold War intelligence service.Rooted in memory and history, Nuclear Family carries the reader into the sense of impending nuclear doom and the explosions of material wealth that shaped Van Loon’s childhood. Poems come alive with image, sound, and texture, portraying the innocence of childhood games, the worldwide effects of prolonged nuclear testing, and the long-lasting legacy of her father’s suicide – a fallout of radioactive silences.In Nuclear Family violent events, both global and familial, permeate a girl’s coming of age in a story of cataclysm and, ultimately, recovery.

the body / knows what / it truly / wants yet / the mind / wavers allIn Edward Carson’s provocative new work, the poetic moving parts of movingparts confront and breathe new life into what’s true and what’s not in Aesop’s fable "The Fox and the Crow," as well as the shifting, often fragmentary ground between what’s said and what’s not about identity and intimacy in Sappho’s lyrics.Reflecting the moment-to-moment ways our minds think, these poems take us from a creative process of disconnection and reassembly to a sonic pacing of words arising out of their stillness on the page. A flair for syntactical compression is found throughout, balanced by a capricious yet transforming diction, what John Ashbery described as seeking to stretch “the bond between language and communication.” Calling witness to the narratives of history while pivoting their reach forward to the present, the rhythms, allusions, and resulting outcomes of Carson’s use of language expand both narrative and discovery. movingparts is brought full circle when an unexpected historical connection between Sappho and Aesop is revealed, hinting that what is true or false in the past or present of our lives can arrive at an intimacy with and illumination of more than we imagine.

Here the long edge / of town Low / winter fog / … My breath / my offering We are / our bodies burningFirmly rooted in fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness. In these poems human voices whisper through the natural world – a hand turns on a lamp to extinguish the stars; stones outline a sleeping form; a black eye is a storm cloud. Errington stokes vivid images, formal grace, and subtle humour into the flickers of life that hold fast against unforgiving terrain. Here language functions like a controlled burn, one that could at any moment preserve, perfect, or reduce to ash.Urgent, resonant to the bone, the swailing burns to the ember-edge of grief, memory, and control to find the wildness, wilderness, and wonder that remain.

For a change Orpheus / listens to the other / musicians once the hum / of his lyre no longer / hangs like moss from branches / in the forest airIn New Songs for OrpheusJohn Reibetanz updates Ovid’s poetry. Ovid’s words showed him to be a person of deep empathy for natural, animal, and human worlds, and so Reibetanz posits that the Roman writer would likely be eager to take account of all that we have learned about them in the past two thousand years.Ovid would be familiar with recent discoveries about the complex inner lives and societies of non-human animals, and about the intricate interrelationships sustained in forests. The poems in New Songs for Orpheus look at and listen to the real creatures into which Ovid’s characters were transformed, acts viewed not as punishment or deprivation, but as a release into other intriguing forms of life. In the human realm, he might find a suitably cataclysmic counterpart to the Trojan War in the barbarities and sacrifices of World War II, or perhaps see an analogue to the Fall of Troy in the fall of the Two Towers in September 2001.The songs Orpheus sings then transform into more contemporary shapes, as characters and incidents from the Canadian musical Come from Away – like those in Ovid’s “restored” world after the flood – are celebrated in a reaffirmation of community after the divisive horrors of 9/11. In all these times and places, metamorphosis brings new meaning into a life, be it human, plant, or animal.

Injury the guide explained / is what / guides explainChatty Cathy, while not the first talking doll, was certainly the most widely known, and the only one elevated to idiom. This unauthorized chronicle of her later career luridly illustrates the perils of reaching such linguistic heights with so very little to say.In The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire Jojo, Gypsy May, Marge, Tootles, and Cathy’s entire gang undertake an abject odyssey to celebrity. On their adventure, they have many picnics, listen to NPR inattentively, play charades, and discover sharp things hidden in love’s thick folds. They end where they began, unutterably broken and luminous.Returning to the snarfs and loving exasperation of his first book, Excitement Tax, John Emil Vincent swipes left and right like no one else writing today. Because why would they?

and it was in these bare sands / that you fell, / beloved.When John Baglow's partner Marianne MacKinnon died in 2006, he decided to assemble a new collection of poems in her memory. No one else knew of what proved to be a slow-moving ambition, but a member of the family mentioned one evening that Marianne had appeared in a dream, saying, “Tell John to finish my book.” After that, what choice did he have?In a famous photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes, for a magical moment, the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation, arcing and swooping as they will, and for perhaps just a singular moment assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing. Some of these poems, inspired by love, grief, and wonder, have been tucked away for years; others are freshly written. All here find their place.There is no narrative in Murmuration, no chronology. Nor are the many personal remembrances and representations in the book confined to one person. Nevertheless, together they are one way of seeing, one way of being. Marianne would approve.

i might never be no-one that shiny / the beauty of a sequin’d self / what was stitched into heaven’s dropThe poems in act normal use illegibility and wilful uncertainty to evade the grasp of the normative, as endured by those institutionalized by, and through, the concept of normalcy.act normal starts in an institution where children categorized and constructed as intellectually inferior are placed into custodial care. These poems are inquisitive, articulating the entanglements of lives across categories of difference – particularly the lives of those who as children were considered to be other or less than human. Drawing upon conversations, archival materials, court cases, legislation, transcripts, and case histories, among other sources, nancy davis halifax’s poems destabilize categories of meaning – understanding disability and difference as “undecidability.”act normal is a movement of “feelingthought,” unsettling normative expectations and inviting readers to re-orient from the normative task of assuming the safety of consensual interpretation, while risking, cherishing, and performing non-indifference.

take the harp, take / the Fitbit and the Band-Aid box. Fold the whole / grey sheet of sky, lumpy and unalluring / into your rucksack.A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey – into the past or the present, or toward what we hope and fear for the future. Poems can be journeys of repair and recovery, adventure and discovery. However, even in pandemic times when our journeying is curtailed, or at least confined, when we are abiding in one physical location with chafing and restiveness, we are still travelling. One of those journeys is discovering where language can take us.Maureen Hynes’s poems travel through cities and their outskirts to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into early childhood, and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations. The title poem addresses the search for tools and instruments that will “ward off adversity” – tools to help us move forward to our chosen destinations. Take the Compass calls on art and nature as invisible helpers, and on uncountable things – personal values and traits such as courage – to “break the bad news into nine living petals.”As with all her collections, Hynes shows a commitment to social justice, to acknowledging historical and contemporary inequities, to the search for sources of remedy, repair, and renewal, and to the sustaining power of love. The variety of poetic forms she has chosen lets this search carry the complexity and seriousness of its themes.

Impulse said preserve the mess of construction, the unbiblical / carnage. This is my excuse for everything.Intensive and extensive, aboutness convenes across geographies and temporalities, in conversation with interlocutors living and dead, real and imagined.Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, this virgule-infused song of negation is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Marked by digression, asides, qualifiers, and a substructure of endnotes that together create layers of indeterminacy, aboutness takes the reader from Twin Peaks to Ganesh, Roland Barthes to Catullus, blue flamingoes to Ophelia, Agnes Martin to St Augustine.Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, this is poetry that resists ossification and refuses to stand still, where the process of production is itself invited to the carnival.

The poet Charles Simic wrote, “Short poems: be brief and tell us everything.”Edward Carson’s extraordinary new work gathers concise diptych – or twofold – poems exploring themes of love, relationships, myth, art, language, math, physics, geometry, and artificial intelligence. Within the two sections of twofold, “dialogues” and “binaries,” the form of the diptych shapes language and meaning as paired poems engage each other across the margins of facing pages. Caroline Bem, author of A Moveable Form, writes: “The diptych, you see, is beautiful. It is symmetry and difference, doubling and mirroring, binarism and seriality. It is the form of paradox, both open and closed, free and contained.”Negotiating surprising twinning combinations, comparisons, and outcomes, the poems in twofold are lively, thought-provoking, and playful interchanges that are also mischievously literate, questioning, and intuitive.

Chomping / champing / championing / churlish / … / There’s a wolf at the door / that looks exactly like meWho is the “whiny baby” in this book? Rather than calling names or hurling insults, the candid poems in this collection most often implicate the poet herself.Expansive in form and voice, the poems in Julie Paul’s second collection offer both love letters and laments. They take us to construction sites, meadows, waiting rooms, beaches, alleys, gardens, and frozen rivers, from Montreal to Hornby Island. They ask us to live in the moment, despite the moment. Including a spirited long poem that riffs on the fairy tale “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” these poems are like old friends that at once console and confess. They blow kisses, they remember, and they celebrate the broken and the lost alongside the beautiful.At turns frank, peevish, introspective, and mischievous, the poems share sincere and intimate perspectives on the changing female body, our natural and built landscapes, and the idiosyncrasies of modern life. Whiny Baby calls on us to simultaneously examine and exult in our brief time on earth.

Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see.The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment.Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the first section ends with a long poem, “Clearance,” that depicts the experience of emptying and departing a home – the physicality of a house serving as a vehicle for processing grief. Pearson writes on family trauma, illness, love, and desire with a pervading sense of hauntedness, compressed, lyrical accounts of complex and ambivalent terrain. The impact of a pandemic lurks in the background, and themes of fear run through much of this collection, with poems exploring how we face our fears – or deny and avoid them – and, ultimately, how we grow and adapt.Through meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death, Pearson reveals the veil between life and death when drawn to its thinnest. Like the hovering falcon depicted in “A Song of Roses,” the poems view the world from above: “if earth is body, and sky – God help us, spirit.”

When he first hiked the Don Valley trails / all he heard was river as he strode / beside its glitter of smashing glassGrounded in the local and immediate – from Toronto’s rivers and ravines to its highways and skyscrapers – Metromorphoses explores some of the radical changes that have taken place in the city during the course of its history.The collection’s poems focus, in roughly chronological order, on the city’s inhabitants and the changing relationships between people and place, from the original Indigenous presence, through the immigrants of the nineteenth century and the Depression and war survivors of the twentieth century, to the twenty-first century’s setbacks and affirmations. We encounter characters such as Symphony Pete, who whistled classical music while hiking Don Valley trails, Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped from southern slavery in a packing crate, or the exhausted anonymous newsboy a photographer caught fast asleep next to his stack of newspapers on a flight of stone steps. We zoom in like time-lapse photography on the changes that a single site has experienced, from wood-frame cottages to foundry to synagogue to furniture store to parking lot to the new provincial courthouse.These poems bring the reader closer to the impulses that drove the art of the Mississaugas, the escape from slavery or famine of new settlers, or the social awareness of a Dr Charles Hastings or a Raymond Moriyama. Far from Eliot’s “unreal city,” Metromorphoses takes us into the heart of the real Toronto, alive and ever-changing.

so the long stretch of life / reveals its curvature / by those widely separated // moments when we are / brushed / by this awareness // of an other / that we do not knowIn his latest collection of poems, poet, deep state researcher, and radical medievalist Peter Dale Scott interrogates topics that have occupied his later thought and writing, such as moreness (our need, as humans, to be more than we are), minding, and enmindment (the generative synergy, engaging both hemispheres of our bicameral mind, of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, now out of kilter).In pursuit of these themes, Scott’s voice ranges far, from engaging with poets of the past and, hopefully, the future to critiques of coercive political power, from elegies for important figures in his life – Leonard Cohen, Daniel Ellsberg, Czeslaw Milosz, and Robert Silvers – to fan letters for “minders” Chelsea Manning and Dr Christine Blasey Ford.Dreamcraft is a book that crosses distances and straddles boundaries, moving from whistleblower law to the mimetic properties of DNA, from “the entropic spread / of the drifting cosmos / after the big bang” to “the push of lawn grass / under foot.”

In my palliative months / the cormorant leaves me / at peace, disintegrating / with the exhalation of a BuddhaWithout Beginning or End is Jacqueline Bourque’s final testament to a life well lived, written in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis.Deeply inspired by her Acadian upbringing along the ocean shores of New Brunswick, these are poems populated by aerialists, painters, and the spirit of Charles Baudelaire, who connects the poet to “the ligatures of life.” Those ligatures in turn connect her with family in the collection’s remarkable title suite, bringing new life to a past that continues to resonate in the present.Without Beginning or End is a book about love, friendship, art, and the human condition. Beautiful, and poignantly human, it is an emotionally charged parting gift to loved ones and readers alike.

I find my bearings by clouds of moon jellies / afloat beneath my anchored boat, / pulsing the sea’s bright night, / their milky way, unfurling.In these lush and vivid poems water gloves a swimmer’s body, is “satin, yes, viscous. Albumen, vernix, newborn slick.” It “rinses gai lan – bright green in a silver bowl” in Hong Kong or hibernates in the Pacific Northwest “under a silky pelt / of rain. People-less. Days, months of this / hiss, softness breaking cliffs.”Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a family’s veins, water is the main character here. It can be turbid, the amniotic colour of spittle, or, in a time of drought, “brilliant beads.” As “a stream flushed over granite,” water seems to want “so little it shares another’s colour,” yet here, it gets our full and necessary attention.Rich with vibrant language and intensity, these poems sizzle in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun. Water Quality calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner.

Such exchanges animate the kingdom // of the clock, but one by one their trades / complete, blink out like eyes. The city sleeps.Set in a vibrant yet ragged coastal city, Kingdom of the Clock is a verse novel whose interwoven storylines begin with one day’s dawn and end at the first light of the next. Within the cycles of that single day, the lives of the city’s inhabitants unfold.An aging stock promoter presides over the fruits of his predatory life. A woman tracks her husband’s iPhone to the casino. An artist races to prevent her masterpiece from being seized to cover unpaid rent. A commuter is shaken by a private vision. A mother plots to care for her unwell adult daughter. Senior and junior partners involved in a fraud weigh the risks and rewards of betraying each other. A boy boards an oil tanker with his father in an emergency. An elderly chess player prays to the moon for his grandchild to be born alive. A homeless man does not know his father is dying.After night’s crescendo comes the blank page of a new day. A clear, flowing lyricism fuses the many moving parts of Kingdom of the Clock into an immersive, unforgettable reading experience.

When the trees came down no one knew how / to interpret the light. homeless / it bounces off glass surfaces / pierces the wandering eye–These poems walk streets and take snapshots of the impact financialization of our homes has on our sense of community and belonging.Meandering through physical and philosophical materials – cement, memory, water, narrative, history, sand, light, concrete, and others’ voices – Daniela Elza documents this urgent moment. The reader winds through fragments amidst urban fragmentation. A sequence of triptych poems hearkens to silos, skyscrapers, and streets. Readers here have a choice: they can read across the page or down. She channels Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni, who says, “The fabric of our cities is reflected in the fabric of our souls.” SCAR/CITY emerges from the Vancouver context to take on global issues of predatory finance and a market that mines homes for profit. It steps outside of binary conversations in favour of poetic reflection and interrogates a system that results in perceptible depravity and scarcity, which leaves us homeless, metaphorically and literally.French philosopher Gaston Bachelard says, “The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed … Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work.” Amidst negotiations and advocacy in the fight for security of tenure and lease renewal, SCAR/CITY is a poetic call to action.

Why are my problems / always the worst? // And why / because I wrote that / do you think I don’t believe it?White Lily is John Emil Vincent’s love note to Louise Glück and Laurie Anderson, two artists inspired and bedevilled by white lilies.Under their spell the poet dives into parable, fable, received wisdom, compact discs, and ruined utopias like a gleeful truant child. The white lily is ever present - its meanings, messages, and seductive scent. The collection begins with a meditation on Anderson’s song “White Lily” and its treatment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fourteen-hour film Berlin Alexanderplatz. It goes on to ponder whether, if we take them in earnest, our mistakes come to serve as the surest sign of seriousness.Throughout, Vincent’s poems trouble what’s exact and exacting, always with the white lily as companion, a promise of rebirth delivered in funeral tones.

that moment / when nothing happens, you want it all to come / back to get you, even the hard stuff —Our increasingly nihilistic age is marked by profound sorrow. We are grieving institutions, art forms, the natural world, our communities – even our very humanity. We are overwhelmed by lives lost to war, violence, genocide, poverty, natural disasters, and disease. We live with the knowledge that a random occurrence could bring an absurd end to any life at any time.In At Beckett’s Grave Robin Durnford gazes at the granite slab marking the resting place of the Irish playwright. In the middle of the ornate tombstones of an overgrown cemetery in Paris, Durnford finds a powerful metaphor in Samuel Beckett – the artist, the exile, the anti-fascist who joined the French resistance. Beckett’s work – and the stark memory of his life – cuts through grandiose self-regard with a razor-sharp message: there is no final meaning. Yet we move forward, regardless.It turns out that the pause — the stage direction central to so many of Beckett’s plays — may be the answer. Grief for an absent loved one never truly ends. Grief itself will never end. Yet, the poetic pause creates space for grief to breathe. During that lingering breath, abiding sorrow carves a path toward hope, one word, one poem, at a time.

Eleonore Schönmaier explores three great forests of her life through the lens of experiential environmentalism. Along woodland trails and on the shores of essential bodies of water, she reveals beauty and loss in equal measure in these poems.Wildlife appears at regular intervals, never when expected. In Schönmaier’s boreal forest childhood, she witnesses human and environmental exploitation and lives a life of labour. In a moment of joy, a canoe transforms into a sled. As she moves into adulthood, music creates a pulse to her life and her poems. In a heatwave, two pianists perform Wasserklavier in a botanical garden. A singer works in the Dutch resistance. A Greek composer creates love songs. An organist rides the rear carrier of a bicycle. Turkish composer Fazl Say performs his Black Earth.Goldfinches, blue-winged teals, waterthrushes, blue herons, and flickers inhabit the pages of Rush of Wingspan. The soundscape of these poems is intimate in scale – about nature, art, animals, cycling – chamber music more than opera. Love is the blue-river thread in the warp and weft of the collection. Schönmaier’s focus on planetary and human rights is the red-blood contrast.

Yes it is both river and sea / yes they mingle together here / yes one empties for the other / yes it tastes like tearsIn a powerful interplay of striking descriptions with tender intimations, Empties, Neil Surkan’s third poetry collection, reckons with fatherhood in a depleted and collapsing environment: Is it possible to nurture new shoots while the fires close in?Feelings of emptiness, acts of emptying, and physical empties coalesce in these vivid and timely poems. Through a queer lens, Surkan’s speaker scrutinizes masculinity and fatherhood as he confronts the necessary emptiness that comes with becoming someone’s ancestor. Arrays of drained and discarded entities – empty bottles, broken pots and cups – summon a world, husked and untenably extracted, that teeters toward collapse, but even those empty spaces are receptacles for fleeting moments of vulnerability and tenderness. At its core, Empties explores the conditions of life on the verge of hopelessness. It finds, among shadows of doom and despair, unlikely but nonetheless inevitable reasons to hope.These are poems that teach endurance “in the face of all that won’t / be saved” while still finding much in the world “to cherish / as it brinks.” In direness, there is also awe: one mustn’t forget, Surkan reminds us, that only empty bottles can sing.

The world’s / face like a / picture plane. / Its space / offered to the / eye as a / colour might be.In these poems, everyday occurrences – an imprint in grass, crumbs in a wrapper, the sound of a thermostat engaging – are opportunities for thinking through close attention. Small Theatres is the latest instalment in Mark Truscott’s exploration of our perceptions and feelings of separation from the world around us.Truscott has mobilized the materiality of language, pushing it into territories of its own failure. These poems find a haunting, opaque song, as they shift theme and method toward time-based disciplines such as music and drama. Small Theatres looks for meaning in an increasingly meaningless world where simultaneous scarcity and excessive availability are products of mechanisms seemingly beyond our grasp. Marshalling minimalist and objectivist techniques and a relentless attention to the fissures running through each thought and every moment of our lives, these poems give shape to a reality constantly on the verge of collapse.Composed at home in the quiet of early morning, Small Theatres evokes practices of solitude, domesticity, and sober attentiveness to the seemingly insignificant.

Once upon a time, you folded / around me like an envelope.Confronting the contradictions, pains, and passions of infidelity, Danielle Hubbard’s new poetry collection jaggedly depicts a mother’s death against the backdrop of a shattering extramarital affair.Following a strong narrative arc, The Electrocutionist shocks life into a full cast of characters – narrator, husband, lover, mother, father, sisters – each of whom is treated to their own portrait poem. The twin settings of rural Manitoba and Vancouver Island come to life as characters themselves. An electric physicality welds the collection together: What to do in the face of a mother’s terminal diagnosis? When a secret affair crashes into the open? When a marriage ties itself in knots? When a husband leaves? Run, run, run.Both concrete and surreal, flailingly emotional and tongue-in-cheek, The Electrocutionist bridges the age-old tradition of romance and the modern desire to explode the strictures of monogamy.

The trouble with honesty, it has no / final answers, leaves you in the cranny / where nothing left unknown meets finding out.The puzzles of poetry and marriage are these: How to hold on to what you also release? How to protect love when other loves are put between? In this collection of sixty-nine “fifteeners” – sonnet-like constellations of five tercets – Jeffery Donaldson explores the outcomes of both questions over the course of a life in verse and a loving thirty-one-year open marriage.The poems orbit around two readings that Donaldson and his wife chose for their wedding: a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke about two people protecting one another’s solitude; and a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in which the prince is told, “You are responsible for your rose.”As openbound turns toward open marriage itself – its risks, its revelations, its misunderstandings, its wounds under cultural scrutiny – the work reveals itself foremost as a book of love poems, continuing Donaldson’s long devotion to a metaphoric both/and poetics capacious enough to hold loving and freedom in the same breath.

Here is where our ruins / are falling in on themselves. Here / is where we ride out our grievance-parade/ and endless he-said she-said teetering / arguments in this world of dizzying / bumper car daysThese are poems of Dorothy and the Witch in Oz, of cinematic mythologies and fractured fairy tales, inviting us to witness acts of grim revenge and reconsider the folkloric forests lodged in our collective minds.With unsparing insight and rueful humour, Batten Down presents verse that rages across landscapes, in an era of increasingly thuggish leadership, where women press forward through persistent danger. Su Croll probes the cultural and historical forces that shape our present moment, indicting and questioning the twisted brutality Alfred Hitchcock visited upon his iconic blondes and the constricting circumstances endured by two wily Tudor queens. Throughout the collection, characters and situations function as a barbarous skeleton key to the confusions of our disordered, bouleversé culture.Batten Down exposes our bruised, chaotic world, believing poetry can both bear witness to its chaos and offer the language and form necessary to better understand it.

From "The Afterlife of Trees" /Neither sheep nor cows crisscross our lives as much./Trees dangle apples and nuts for the hungry, throw/shade down for lovers, mark sites for the lost,/and first and last are/utterly themselves,/fuller and finer than any letter or number,/any 7 or T. Their fragmentary afterlife goes on/in a guitar's body and a hockey stick, in the beaked faces/up a totem pole and the stake through a vampire's heart,/in a fragrant cheese-board, a Welsh love-spoon,/a sweat-stained axe handle, a giant green dragonfly suspended from the ceiling with twine,/in the spellbinding shapechanging/behind a glass woodstove-door...