In great poems, chosen words combine in ways which confer unique meaning memorably with resonance and power. The scent they produce infiltrates the mind, like body chemistry. I have good chemistry with this poem.

This poem starts with a blow which jolts the reader urgently from peace to panic. It is delivered by a narrator who says ominously ‘hush, this lion sleeps tonight.’ The wind no longer blows. A sombre, yet tense, insistent tone is set. The reader’s attention is dramatically gained; the opening is intriguing. Why the frozen stillness?

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Posted on March 03, 2009
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Excerpt from Feature Essay: L’Abbé’s Top Thirty

… The other morning my friend Reza and I were on a bus in Vancouver, and as we turned from East King Edward onto Kingsway, he told me that when he first came to the city he had taken a room in one of the houses nearby. “This,” he said, indicating the small, boxish bungalows and stamp-sized lawns we were passing, “is my first impression of Canada.” He has been in B.C. for four years, I for less than six months. Strange, that a relative newcomer from Iran should be showing the Canadian around East Van. Reza has also been on several Transcanada trips, as far as the Maritimes, all the way up to Labrador; I have never been east of Quebec city. Which of us can say they know Canada?

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Posted on June 19, 2008
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Brief Review

George Murray. A Set of Deadly Negotiations.
Victoria (BC): Frog Hollow Press, 2005.

The last book of poems that frightened me was George Murray’s The Hunter (2003). I’m not accustomed to thinking of poetry as a frightening genre. Unlike life and many fictions, poems end neatly; they insist on order; they elude the march of time. Not Murray’s. His Hunter tracks Yeats’s rough beast—or is tracked by it; or is that beast—through fire and desert towards no certain Bethlehem. The poems’ lines go two by two or three by three—but to call these stanzas couplets or triplets belies their staggered state. And because the poems eschew regular rhyme and metre, like fire they resist one’s efforts at remembrance. The poems are burnt out from around their titular bones: what sticks in one’s mind is the index, an alphabetical sequence that reads like a skeletal poem (Albatross, Anchor, Arrow, Bear, Bed, Bomb, Book …)….

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Posted on July 09, 2006
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Arc 59, The Woozy Issue : Table of Contents | Contributors | Cover Credit | Back Cover Credit | Web Archive | Get Issue | Subscribe

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Posted on December 12, 2007
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Read press releases and award-winning reviews.

The Inspiration

Book reviewing is an art that involves the engagement of the critic's sensibility with the text. With the Critic's Desk Award, Arc marks the importance that the thoughtful treatment of poetry holds in the evolution and wider appreciation of the genre.

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Posted on May 02, 2006
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