Erebus, the dark and shadowy outer realm of the Underworld in Greek mythology, becomes a place of transition and becoming in Julia McCarthy's Return from Erebus

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The poems articulate this darkness with such keen and evocative vision and language that it appears to be made of light; they explore the richness of being, the ephemeral nature of our experience, and its inherent grief, where jays smash like blue china/flung into the trees/and fly away mending themselves' and you hear rain and the river/the sound of water walking on itself again.

Julia McCarthy is originally from Toronto, ON. She spent a decade living in the U.S., most notably in Alaska and Georgia. She also lived in Norway and spent significant time in South Africa before returning to Canada and settling in rural Nova Scotia where she worked as a potter to support her poetry habit. She is the author of two previous poetry collections: Stormthrower (Wolsak and Wynn, 2002) and Return From Erebus (Brick Books, 2010), the latter of which received the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award.

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