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A Sudden Sky is a book of northern poems with crystalline images and lines, fragile graceful poems that speak of fragments, of the moment between open and closed eyes, of the human need for embrace. These poems note the spaces between things -- always a gap, a failed connection, like radio waves caught in the sky. Gernes has called poetry "a resistance movement," explaining, "A poem gives us the possibility of hearing our own voices. While the media offer us the world in small pieces, which are experienced as chaos, poetry seeks connections."

At the time of writing this book, William Robertson was a homemaker. His poems bring a new passion to the ancient domestic scene, and to everything else he looks at out of that often-turbulent centre. He ventures with care "into a swelling sea/ of silted meanings" equipped with his own elegant flexible vernacular, shaped precisely to the task of lighting up the trials and wonders of ostensibly ordinary days. These poems ring like crystal-hard edges of a tender heart.

Year Zero is the time of hushed beginnings and endings, the place of naming and unnaming, where language, strange to itself, tiptoes along songlines as though following passages of Koto music. In Brian Henderson's poetry, poised and listening on this hinge of creativity, ontological wonder is informed by awareness of the paradoxes at the heart of language, that language wants you for itself, and that what is named, falls.

In Ordinary Hours, the follow-up to Karen Enns' Gerald Lampert Award-nominated first collection, That Other Beauty, we revisit Enns' rural Mennonite childhood, replete with the sensuousness of "diesel fuel" and "hot peaches." Enns also explores the Mennonite exodus from Russia, tracking its faint but unmistakable reverberations in the daily lives of its survivors and revealing the redemptive character of that dailiness. Reading an Enns poem feels effortless: her rhythms and phrasing are so minutely calibrated that the poem unfolds as if of its own accord.

Winner of the 1993 Archibald Lampman Award and shortlisted for the 1992 Pat Lowther Award Summer Grass follows Marianne Bluger's previous Brick books, On Nights Like This (1984) and Gathering Wild (1988). The two movements of Summer Grass, between them, comprehend the darknesses of "County Dire" and the depths of contentment in love and in home among the other (animate and inanimate) members of earth. Not literature, these poems are "uttered deeds." They probe "midnight gravities" with a light-suffused language born of faith.

A new edition of a hockey saga, wrapping the game's story in the "intense, moody, contradictory" character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies. Denied the leap and dash up the ice, what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing, which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.

Winner of the 2001 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2001 Regina Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards). Shortlisted for the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards. A wide-ranging reckless intelligence, verbal audacity and irrepressible humour -- all these combine with a large-hearted embrace of existence in Ken Howe's poems.

Poems that occupy the difficult territory of contemporary crisis with great candour and trenchant wit. Steve McOrmond’s unflinching take on contemporary life, with its saturnine candour and ironic focus, may remind readers of the anti-poetry of Europeans like Zbigniew Herbert: intense, humanistic and deeply sceptical of inflationary gestures or stagy rhetoric. Shedding illusions, but equally refusing the consolations of despair, McOrmond’s well-tempered satire is carried home on its own crisp music.

Granddaughters, asters, Medea cakes, para pom tandle, Mrs. Roker raking, Caraquet, angelic recurrence, Neruda, zupzupzup, the high bush cranberries, the Somme, a waterfall in Iceland that cries by the thousandsful, the Strawberry Shaman and the Japonica Bushelful Bountiful Lady: you would never mistake a Colleen Thibaudeau wordscape for any other. Her poems might have been written just after the imagination was invented.

Shortlisted for the 1994 Pat Lowther Award "I believe in the common magic/ of forests and household godd" writes Neile Graham in "Spells for Clear Vision," the title poem of this volume. And it is a common magic which she works in this poetry of delicate attentions. Graham writes about trying to see clearly, about trying to articulate ways of living in a modern, often blinding world. Meditative, individual and ever-open to the intricate and shifting world around her, Graham's is a pensive and a thoughtful eye.