What begins as a look back at a different time in history quickly takes a dark turn in Bob Currie’s latest collection. Embodying a variety of characters, often in different voices – both those of well-known classic poets as well as the voices of Saskatchewan poets past and present – Currie ponders the collective human experience. With razor-sharp precision and telltale imagery, these poems explore domestic and public life: bad marriages, infidelity, poverty, gun violence, and in a final section, death – and how these experiences change (or don’t) between one generation and the next. Currie expertly combines seemingly innocuous poems – catching fish, discovering false breasts in a dresser – with more sinister and somber poems – murder, hiding from a gunman outside of a grocery store, bearing witness to the death of loved ones – with poignant candor.
What begins as a look back at a different time in history quickly takes a dark turn in Bob Currie’s latest collection. Embodying a variety of characters, often in different voices – both those of well-known classic poets as well as the voices of Saskatchewan poets past and present – Currie ponders the collective human experience. With razor-sharp precision and telltale imagery, these poems explore domestic and public life: bad marriages, infidelity, poverty, gun violence, and in a final section, death – and how these experiences change (or don’t) between one generation and the next. Currie expertly combines seemingly innocuous poems – catching fish, discovering false breasts in a dresser – with more sinister and somber poems – murder, hiding from a gunman outside of a grocery store, bearing witness to the death of loved ones – with poignant candor.