Coastlines
Atlantic Canada is enjoying a renaissance unknown since the days of Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn, and John Thompson. Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada features work by 60 of the region’s finest poets in a volume that will whet appetites for more. The earlier poetry renaissance began in 1945, with the establishment of The Fiddlehead magazine …
Namesake
"It started with a history project. Mr. Gregor assigned a research paper on a figure from the Tudor era, and of course Jane Grey had to pick her namesake - Lady Jane Grey, the fifteen-year-old girl whose parentsschemed to place her on the throne of England, then abandoned her to face the executioner. The project is engrossing from the start, but wh …
That Singing You Hear at the Edges
This is a collection in which the unexpected is commonplace: "the" and "an" attend a 12-step group for co-dependents; the human tongue is exposed as "old amphibian"; and The Angel of You Made this Mess, Lie Down rises from tangled bedsheets. MacLeod works intimately, intricately, with the power of nuance, of detail. The dividing walls of time and p …
The God of PocketsThe God of Pockets smiles on children.On their thumb-polished chestnuts. And what She,in her benevolence, sees as their innocentlint. She sees the lucky pennydrop, knows the hungerof keys. Knows what the landlord has talliedon his calculator. Knows the man who sleepsoutside the library. In particular, the flattenedpack of smokesagainst his chest. She's heldthe knife that carvedthe crookedheart into the tree trunk. The referee's whistle.The mickey of gin. The wallet, and the picturein the wallet, and the smilein the picture. The finallyunbearable weight of a gunin its holster. Weight of a secret, held in.She's the god of tide pools. Of harmonicas.Marsupials. A motherbounding forty miles an hourthrough the flatlands, joeyleaning out over the edge. She knows the wayto a ten-dollar billtucked in last winter's coaton a flat-broke day in spring—like one morething that time'sforgotten. And on bright dayswhen the swing sets and the iron railsof the monkey bars throw shadows, tall asoffice towers spreading to the outback,the God of Pockets speaksto children. Run, She says. Takewhat you can. To a friend with her daughter, washing dishesWe speak of old age, and put it awayagain: thought on a string.I sip your good, strong coffeewhile we joke about our fortiesas a dress rehearsal.Curtain time ahead! We scare ourselves like kidsat movies. How we doexaggerate, the wayI do now, convincedthat Lynne’s movements are smoother,more supple than yoursas you work together at the kitchen sink.And when did her hair become thicker?more auburn? I watchher shoulder blades—a pair of wingscould sprout there. And she’s the onebest able now to reachthe highest shelf.There’s a shifttaking place, this is just the beginning,as if something’s draining out of usand into them. Remember how bigwe were once? We weregiants of women.With young daughters riding the curvesof our hips, we’d glide through our roomscollecting Mommy’s keys, and Mommy’s wallet.We were Olive Oyl.We were Popeye, too.*A shaft of lightis falling through your window nowand spreads to every surface.There are no cleardilineations, notlike in the swimming lessonswhen the girls were small. The comfortof badges, of lanes.And no bigger miracles, maybe, than this:that we’re talking in the kitchen, still, and our girlsnearly grown. And there’ll be nowell-marked corridor to oldfrom not old yet—onlygradations of light, of heattouching and leavingthe skin.But what do I know?sitting here with my coffeewhere I can still playwith an image like this one:that we’re all enrolled in the samedusty classroom, an old-fashioned classroom,early afternoon, lingering odorof paperbag lunchesfrom home, and they’re writing on the blackboardwith their backs to us, our large and shiningchildren, and the chalk they’re usingused to be our bones.