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Poetry Reviews

Review of Dan O'Brien's "Our Cancers" by Megan Kuklis

Posted on December 2, 2021

Dan O’Brien is a poet and playwright. His poetry collections include Our Cancers, War Reporter, New Life, and Scarsdale. O’Brien is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and two PEN America Awards for playwriting. His work has been published in several issue of The Fiddlehead, most recently in issue 283 (Spring 2020). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Asking the Impossible: A Review by Dominique Béchard of Virginia Konchan's "Any God Will Do"

Posted on September 27, 2021

Asking the Impossible

Any God Will Do, Virginia Konchan. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020.

 

While reading Halifax-based poet Virginia Konchan’s second collection, I experienced my capacity for feeling — in the broadest, most contradictory sense — expand. In fact, Any God Will Do seems to me essentially about excess (of feeling, of stimulus, of being) and about the idea of divinity as an overwhelming localization of the too-much.

. . . she opened the door of a star quietly: A Review by M. Travis Lane of Yannis Ritsos' "Poems — Selected Books Volume II." Trans. Manolis Aligizakis

Posted on September 21, 2021

. . . she opened the door of a star quietly

Poems — Selected Books Volume II, Yannis Ritsos Trans. Manolis Aligizakis. Ekstasis Editions, 2020

 

It is not the poem which closes : A Review by Anita Lahey of M. Travis Lane's "A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl" and "Keeping Count"

Posted on March 12, 2021

It is not the poem which closes


A Tent, A Lantern, An Empty Bowl and Keeping Count, M. Travis Lane. Gordon Hill Press, 2020

Let’s begin with rocks and mud.

The poem “May Rocks,” which appears nearly midway through Keeping Count, M. Travis Lane’s most recent collection, begins with a single-word sentence: “Spring.” This is followed by rocks that “butt and push” in a lawn “jagged with dragon’s teeth.” It continues:

Cultural Stoicism & Atlantic Canadian Vernacular: Carmelita McGrath’s Escape Velocity

Posted on August 6, 2014

By Phillip Crymble

A Review of Carmelita McGraw's Escape Velocity (Goose Lane, 2013) I was reminded, in reading through Escape Velocity, of the cultural and aural vernacular that’s so much a part of the literary geography of Newfoundland. The trick, I think, with any brogue, is to try and do it justice without putting the idiomatic phrases and language used in jeopardy of being considered a caricature. McGrath deftly straddles the line in this new collection, and her ability to recognize and resist the impulse to essentially reduce native Newfoundlanders to a comic commodity through exaggerated dialect is one of the book’s great achievements.

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