Author Archives: Nicholas Power

September 6, 2016 In John Steffler’s ‘Dividing Island’, from his collection Lookout, the poem is capable of looking inside a growing family and outside at their borrowed ‘home’ of Newfoundland in 51 cumulatively powerful lines. The feeling, as one reads, … Continue reading →

August 31, 2016 Reworking lines from Pablo Neruda’s elegy for Alberto Rojas Jiménez – “you come flying / over cities with roofs under water” – Elizabeth Bishop poetically invited Marianne Moore to ‘please come flying’ over a Manhattan ‘awash with … Continue reading →

August 22, 2016 If a modest intention of poetry is to stop time, then Don Domanski succeeds masterfully in Fetishes of the Floating World. This numbered series of eighteen reflective poems, published by espresso (an imprint of paperplates books) in … Continue reading →

August 15, 2016 What makes a poem jump? In Joy Harjo’s poem ‘We Were There When Jazz Was Invented’ (from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings) the poem jumps along with her saxophonist friend Jim Pepper at the stomp. It also … Continue reading →

August 8, 2016 There is a quality of music in the balanced rhythms of Julie Roorda’s poetry. Except for the 17- part sequence The Altruist, her poems in Courage Underground (Guernica 2006) rarely go beyond a page. She hardly needs … Continue reading →

August 1, 2016 By the end of the poem, ‘The Novel as Manuscript,’ from his poetry collection The Quotations of Bone, Norman Dubie elaborates his ars poetica. First, he describes how the whole Soviet system starts to vanish when “postage … Continue reading →

this poem is everything she is and isn’t how carefully she is restrained yet contiguous her beauty raises as many questions as answers yet she’s the one who makes sense in an uncertain world she summons in me the concordant … Continue reading →

a larger river is still with us fills up the whole valley so full of fish we imagine walking on the water not this unlikely urban river debranched     half-buried shorn of its meanderings we greet the lager river with patterns … Continue reading →

The Play of Light in Wychwood 1 in transformed space friends, artists, and neighbours in knots of talk under one roof listening opening the door and letting in the city one line one image one thought at a time all … Continue reading →