Book: Bait & Switch: Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and Views on Canadian PoetryAuthor: Jim JohnstonePublisher: The Porcupine’s Quill (2024) Jim Johnstone is a Canadian poet in his mid-40s who is very much in the tradition of earlier poets like Louis Dudek, George Bowering, Ken Norris and others in that he is not only a writer of […]
A Cut Above You just can’t buy a good haircut online. I sit with mock patience at quarter to nine, waiting for a stylist much older than me, who will seize my hair band with smiling glee, and tickle my ear with her expertise. “My dear, you’re balding! But, in a niche sort of way
A Cut Above by Sarah Collister Read More »
the thrush last night our old thrush in the square descended from the ones who sang to soldiers as they rested from the Roman Wall – safe Syrians who set their bows aside and Belgians brought across the wide North Sea to here – we heard as a nightingale so long and varied so deep
the thrush by Desmond Graham Read More »
Middle of the Road I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur Extremes meet – it’s the only way I ken To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt That damns the vast majority o’ men. – Hugh MacDiarmid How did we get here? This passing place on the way to getting auld, this
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Almost an apology In his last weeks I visit my father yellowed by medicine dying more quickly now leaning against the range heating his backside nursing his coffee I breathe leap into the silence thank you for being a great dad I am six years old arms outstretched for love He pauses, his gaze soft,
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Earthworms for Geoff Wood Earthworms, it seems, are made of tongues, and are able to taste with every inch of their writhing bodies. What a life of joy they must have, and a life of horror, to not be able to turn off life’s every passing flavour. I remember the ones my father and I
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‘The people need poetry that will be their own secret / To keep them awake forever’. So wrote Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian-language poet who perished under Stalin. It seems almost quaint now to claim that people need poetry, but they do. Why else would this ancient art form have so stubbornly persisted into modern
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