by prfire | Jun 30, 2015 | Book Reviews, Poetry
There is such density in Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry, and such a wide range of images and concerns. It may be best to focus on several representative selections from different poems in this fine collection of his poetry and prose from 1954 to 2004, a half century of...
by prfire | May 6, 2015 | Book Reviews, Fiction
As I read Reading by Lightning, Joan Thomas’s first novel, I felt grateful to my parents’ generation for breaking ties with religious fundamentalism. As I read her second novel, Curiosity, I thought about feminist historians and the novelist’s gift for detail – that...
by prfire | Mar 9, 2015 | Book Reviews, Fiction
Aptly, the cautionary epigraph from Ecclesiastes (12:12) with which David Bergen frames this, his most explicit and richest inquiry to date into the fraught relations among living, reading and writing, love and lust, mind and body and human being, advises both the...
by prfire | Jan 26, 2015 | Book Reviews, Drama
Carolyn Gray looks back some 350 years to the French playwright Molière and his play The Miser or L’Avare to find the subject for The Miser of Middlegate, the latest in her series of plays set in Winnipeg. Her version, like the original, places a rich miser at the...
by prfire | Dec 18, 2014 | Book Reviews, Poetry
The first as well as the most lasting impression of Laisha Rosnau’s third book of poetry can best be summed up as “young-maternal.” Rosnau writes from an internal reckoning based in the centre of her body. Her pursuit of themes is uterine grounded. Not that most of...
by prfire | Jul 16, 2014 | Book Reviews, Poetry
What an odd title for a book of poems. I conjure up a beast, or a fantastic creature like the shadow in Robert Munsch’s children’s story The Dark. The title poem concerns a woman with an eating disorder that has afflicted her throughout her life. Young focuses on our...
