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Reading Edge Effects, Jan Conn’s masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer/reader for completion.

This extraordinary sequence of prose and free verse poems explores the postures, styles, and rhetorics of our culture and its history -- not with the predictable aim of criticism and rejection, or the fashionable aim of recombinant word-play, but in the service of an unflinching, and thereby real, passion. This is humane vision of great breadth, depth, and particularity.

On the day that David Waltner-Toews' young daughter Rebecca gave "Mr. Fluff, that venerable stuffed dog" to her older brother, the poet learned a lesson in community building -- to get what you really want you must give it away and then share it back. There is nothing didactic about The Fat Lady Struck Dumb, though the book is packed with wisdom compacted of love for the planet and detailed knowledge of its ecosystems, including the stress they currently suffer. These are passionate poems of a committed citizen ardently testifying for the globe, his home and ours.

Afloat, John Reibetanz's eighth collection of poetry, focuses on water in many manifestations. The centerpiece, a sequence on the Three Gorges Dam and its cultural and environmental implications, brings ancient Chinese sources (Meng Chiao and the painter Dong Yuan) together with modern ones (Edward Burtynsky's photographs and violent video games) to create an elegy that is moving and meditative. Although water is everywhere present as a subject, it is song that provides the motivating power, the vehicle of longing that animates the book.

Shortlisted for the 2001 Pat Lowther Award and the 2001 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes) In her second book, Slow-Moving Target, Sue Wheeler unwraps more than the Fifties. She unwraps a whole shopful of environments and events, and winds them up and sets them down to delight her readers. There is no sentimentalizing here -- either of people or of other places and times -- and yet the writing is so consistently sharp, perceptive, and clear, that the overall direction is always towards hope, towards the light.

Under the sugar maples of Montreal, family life is given mythic dimensions in this sweeping novella-in-verse. If Dionysus and Ariadne lived in Montreal in the late twentieth century, would he serve veal stuffed with apples and paté de fois gras? Coach nubile young singers in a performance of L’Orfeo? Would Ariadne's thread be fashioned into tapestries of furious elegy in the face of environmental catastrophe? Would their marriage survive?

Precisely etched meditations on public and private experience, charged landscapes and reconceived Greek myths.

Shortlisted for the 1997 Pat Lowther Award and for the 1997 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award Toward a Catalogue of Falling, Meira Cook's second full-length book, proves that the fall into language can be both graceful and startling. Whether she is rewriting Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid" (as she does in her poem sequence "Days of Water"), thinking of Breughel's/Williams'/ Auden's Icarus, reading oranges, or offering advice for catching crows, Cook's words are luminous.

Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards Whatever their subject -- the unwinding of lovers, childhood as the foundation of being, the metaphorical life of everyday objects and events -- S.E. Venart's poems show us a kind of courage that is quotidian. Surviving childhood, surviving failed love, finding solace in the self, and reinvigorating that self: this is the world Venart reveals to us, in all its prescient detail. A honest and lyrical first book.

There are many journeys encompassed in the pages of this mature and well-crafted first collection; literal travels to different parts of the world, to Europe and Africa, are the outward manifestation of the inward quest, the asking of the old but still essential questions: What is real? What is true? What is honourable? What is right? Yet these questions are new in that the poet is deeply concerned with the need to find a new paradigm, a new way to relate to the earth at this time of ever-heightening environmental crisis.