3 New Poetry Collections by 4 Canadian Poets

The Deer Yard : a winter cycle (M)
by Allan Cooper and Harry Thurston

"In the winter of 2009, Harry Thurston travelled to Campbell River on Vancouver Island to serve a term as writer in residence in the former home of the renowned fisherman and environmentalist Roderick Haig-Brown. While there, he and his longtime friend Allan Cooper embarked on a poetic correspondence; Thurston would send his Campbell River poems east and Cooper would reply. In this, they were consciously following the model of the Wang River Sequence, a poetic correspondence written by the Chinese poets Wang Wei and P'ei Ti over 1200 years ago.
"Our poetry - separately - has always been rooted deeply in the natural world," writes Thurston. "Like many other Western poets, we have looked to the East, to classical Chinese poetry, as one model to best express our relationship with what we now call the environment, a no less reverential term than Nature." The resulting twenty-one poems are reflective and richly imagistic, chronicling a single winter season as experienced by two writers on opposite Canadian coasts" - publisher

The Ocean (M)
by Sue Goyette

"The ocean has never had a biographer quite like Sue Goyette. Living in the port city of Halifax, Goyette’s days are bounded by the substantial fact of the North Atlantic, both by its physical presence and by its metaphoric connotations. And like many of life’s overwhelming facts, our awareness of the ocean’s importance and impact waxes and wanes as the ocean sometimes lurks in the background, sometimes imposes itself upon us, yet always, steadily, is. This collection is not your standard “Oh, Ocean!” versifying. Goyette plunges in and swims well outside the buoys to craft a sort of alternate, apocryphal account of our relationship with the ocean." - publisher

"Mythologizing the sea, by anthropomorphizing it and our relationship to it, is a remarkable, somewhat daring feat. One that’s produced a spellbinding read, that’s even a little funny at times. It takes boatloads of talent and skill to pull of a book like this, and more importantly, it takes conviction, courage, and ambition to plough your way into new terrain as an artist, as Sue has here" - Salty Ink

Under the Keel (M)
by Michael Crummey

"Michael Crummey’s first collection in a decade has something for everyone: Love and marriage and airport grief; how not to get laid in a Newfoundland mining town; total immersion baptism; the grand machinery of decay; migrant music and invisible crowns and mortifying engagements with babysitters; the transcendent properties of home brew. Whether charting the merciless complications of childhood, or the unpredictable consolations of middle age, these are poems of magic and ruin. Under the Keel affirms Crummey's place as one of our necessary writers." - publisher