The poems in Carapace explore the tensions between life and death as they battle for equal play in the natural world. As in her last two collections of poetry -The First Day of Winter and Fault Line - Lush returns to the themes of loss, death, birth, and rebirth, but with a more unforgiving eye and savage vision, exploring the dualities and ironies of experiencing these states simultaneously. At times, these poems are told through the eyes of a new mother as she attempts to balance the complex and often-times conflicting emotions that accompany motherhood: joy, anger, uncertainty, awe and fear. At other times, they are told through the eyes of a bereft narrator as she comes to grip with death and loss. Driving these poems is an often random and unexplained energy that arises from nature, the life force that underpins the natural world as it gives way to both regeneration and degeneration, and the surrendering to these forces as the narrator tries to arrive at some sort of understanding. The results are short lyric-narratives written in a highly imagistic mode.

Laura Lush, known for her highly imagistic and lyrical poetry, lives and teaches in Toronto. She has published two previous collections of poems: Hometown, which was nominated for the 1992 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and Fault Line (1997). Poems from The First Day of Winter earned her second place in the 2002 CBC Literary Contest. Her first collection of fiction, Going to the Zoo, is to be published by Turnstone Press.

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