PoetryReviews.ca

NeWest Press - April 10, 2007 - 0 Comments

This Way the Road by Nina Berkhout

Reviewed by Jenna Butler

Nina Berkhout’s This Way the Road is a perceptive, beautifully-written collection concerning love, tragedy (both historical and personal), and humankind’s ability to inhabit the past. Focusing specifically on the worlds of art and museums, the collection explores one couple’s love relationship and the ways in which the past may continue to be an occupied space long after actual historical events are over.

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NeWest Press - March 21, 2006 - 0 Comments

Vancouver Walking by Meredith Quartermain

Reviewed by Jenna Butler

Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking is a sensory and historical exploration into what creates a sense of place; specifically, how identity becomes layered onto a place by the different groups of people who live there.

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NeWest Press - March 01, 2006 - 0 Comments

The Wireless Room by Shane Rhodes

Reviewed by Eric Barstad

Shane Rhodes takes a lot of poetic risks in The Wireless Room (NeWest 2000). Rhodes is not governed by any one style, form, language, or theme; he is about variation, innovation, intelligence, and electricity.

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NeWest Press - February 11, 2006 - 0 Comments

Blue Feast by Shawna Lemay

Reviewed by Eric Barstad

Shawna Lemay’s Blue Feast (NeWest 2005) is an intensely personal book. In the poem “Unfinished Letter,” Lemay writes:

I don’t mind.
Having someone else’s poetry course through me
leaving me scraped out and raw. (83)

And this is, essentially, how we’re supposed to come away from these poems, with a feeling of catharsis, of having been emotionally emptied. We’re supposed to share in the experiences and emotions of these poems alongside the author.

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NeWest Press - February 09, 2006 - 0 Comments

Were the Bees by Andy Weaver

Reviewed by rob mclennan

Some of us have been waiting years for a first collection from Edmonton poet Andy Weaver to appear, and finally it has, published by Edmonton’s NeWest Press in spring 2005 as the collection Were the Bees. Weaver’s poems are almost a bridge between the prairie lines of Robert Kroetsch, the current trends of more traditional Canadian lyric modes and the considerations of the Canadian avant-garde. An admirer of the work of Don McKay and Jan Zwicky, for example, Weaver holds as much appreciation for the work of, say, derek beaulieu and Louis Cabri, all of which he has brought to Edmonton as part of his former involvement (as founder/organizer) in the monthly Olive reading and chapbook series.

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