by Khalil Gibran The Prophet is Gibran’s famous collection of poetic essays. Framed as a prophet preparing to leave a place he’s lived for over a decade, he imparts his final words of wisdom to the people he loves, those who have come to love him back, who listen in rapt attention. And these words…
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by Gary Barwin No TV for Woodpeckers is Barwin’s collection of experimental poetry. In the first section, “Needleminer,” the author takes a number of poems by other authors––representative of the industrial Hamilton landscape, from what he explains––and populates it with flora and fauna found throughout the area by replacing nouns from the source poems with…
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by Homer The Odyssey continues the story immediately after the sacking of Troy by the Greeks, so you can imagine it’s at least a bit exciting, picking this up so soon after finishing The Iliad. The hero, Odysseus, attempts to return to Ithaca, to his patient wife and son whom he left as an infant….
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by Homer What a time to be alive, the era of glory and warfare recounted within The Iliad. Life gave no room for softness was we know it today: You were forced to cruelty, or else be left to the whims of those without mercy. A more modern discussion of peace and harmony among men…
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by Micah Pawluk While Pawluk covers a range of topics in his debut poetry collection, A Boy from the Woods, the vast majority of the book concerns his thoughts on love. The author often groups poems with similar ideas and themes together, occasionally growing and building off of the previous ones in a narrative fashion,…
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by Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass is another poetry collection for which, like Ezra Pound’s Cathay, I can easily appreciate its importance to the history of Western literature. Wanting to create modern poetry for the New World, Whitman eschewed antique forms and themes, minimizing focus on structured rhymes, instead expressing more of the mundane and…
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by Charles Bukowski At the time of writing this, I just finished getting through a stack of poetry in preparation for an author panel event I was tasked at moderating, and, aside from perhaps Ezra Pound’s Cathay, this was likely my favourite collection. The trouble is I’m having some difficulty getting at the why of…
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by Ezra Pound Cathay is a collection of old poems––mainly Chinese works from the 8th century––translated by Pound, but it’s a bit more complicated and interesting than that. Pound, who at that time knew little to no Chinese, worked from the notes of the Harvard educated scholar, Ernest Fenollosa, a transcript of which is included…
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by Karen Connelly For the second in my series of reviews related to the International Festival of Authors Thunder Bay events comes another poetry collection, Come Cold River by Karen Connelly. In comparison to Country Club, Connelly forgoes the large range of topics McGuire covers in his poems to pursue a more vivid, narrative verse….
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by Andy McGuire In the lead-up to the International Festival of Authors events in Thunder Bay, I decided to take it upon myself to read something by each of the participating authors. While I have enjoyed past events, I figured this would give me a bit more background so that I can get more out…
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