Water

Deepwater Vee

“This boat grafts you to water’s big-winged glide,” observes Melanie Siebert in Deepwater Vee, her beautifully original debut poetry collection. Shortlisted for the 2010 Governor General’s Award, Deepwater Vee is itself a boat, sailing on Siebert’s 10 years as a professional guide on rivers from Alaska to Baffin Island, including the desecrated North Saskatchewan and Athabasca. Her words carry us to the heart of wilderness landscapes and reveal startling new ways of understanding them. The poems in this collection evoke Siebert’s journeys with a surge of language that runs at times with a deep, measured fluidity, then dives into sudden chutes of unexpected metaphors or dark realities.
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Open Wide a Wilderness

Open Wide a Wilderness
Nancy Holmes ed., Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009, 510 pages.

Nancy Holmes, a professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, is to be congratulated for this plump and sumptuous anthology of English language Canadian nature poetry.

In Open Wide a Wilderness, two centuries of poetry by over 190 poets are assembled in only 510 pages. Although it enjoys little mainstream attention, Canadian poetry is strewn throughout the myriad inconspicuous little seeps and rivulets that feed the watersheds nourishing our national literary culture. It’s found in the colourful archipelago of small presses across Canada (including Turnstone, … [Click here to read more!] Continue reading Open Wide a Wilderness