Brent MacLaine's elegant, capacious, and finely crafted fourth collection, Athena Becomes a Swallow, contains twenty-seven monologues spoken by characters that appear in Homer's The Odyssey. These are not the voices of the major players, but the voices of the minor characters who received scant attention in the original. Here they are allowed to have their say about the events that swirl around them, providing a new persepctive and showing how the shine of the gods also falls on the common folk.

Brent MacLaine's teaching career has taken him to universities in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Singapore. Since 1991, he has been a professor of English at the University of Prince Edward Island, where he has received the prestigious 3M Award for excellence in teaching. MacLaine is the author of one previous collection of poetry, the highly acclaimed Wind and Root (2000, Vehicule Press). His poems have also appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, The Windsor Review, Matrix and The Cormorant, and in anthologies such as Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Poetry of the Land and Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada. MacLaine's ancestors came to Rice Point, Prince Edward Island, in 1838. Today he lives on a corner of the family farm there, overlooking the Northumberland Strait.

Brent MacLaine's profile page

"Exploring the nooks and crannies of Homer's great epic poem, Brent MacLaine casts a kind of anti-Circean spell, granting a deeper humanity, a lyric consciousness, to figures half-hidden in shadow, fate-gripped. As the monologues build, this cadenced talk of laundry maid or beggar or musician becomes a meditation on poetry itself."

Mary Dalton

"'My imprint keeps. I shall be transformed,' says the scribe in one of these vivid monologues. MacLaine's own imprint keeps, and we are transformed — enchanged by rhythms that catch the throat-sounds of unsung heroes, and by luminous visions seen through their eyes, as his art turns ‘rounded underwater stones to gold.'"

John Reibetanz

"A classic in terms of psychological depth, creativity, style, angle, and theme... It's rare that one reads a 90-page collection of poems filled with so much craft, wit, and brilliance."

<i>Arc Poetry Magazine</i>