Further ‘bests’: poetry

Best Canadian Poetry 2026
Selected by Mary Dalton

Windsor: Biblioasis, 2025
$24.95 / 9781771966764

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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Here’s an anthology of Canadian poetry in English published in literary magazines from late 2023 through 2024. Chances are they were written years before that. This is a snapshot of a decade!

Our photographer is the esteemed Mary Dalton, a poet with authority gained over a career of writing with her clear, strong voice. She made this book by sorting through magazine editors’ choices.

There are some ironies. For one, so many of these poems are rooted in the culture of spoken word, making the book an open mic session or a Youtube scroll more than a book of texts.

For another, both in the magazines and in this book itself, not all poems are chosen. There is rejection. Because we are negotiating with myths of individual voice, there is hurt. It’s hardly surprising then that in all the poems of Best Canadian Poetry 2026, rejection and isolation are consistent themes. The poems present a toolbox of approaches to overcome it.

That’s healthy. It’s also healthy to remember that the magazines, and this anthology, aren’t judgements but glimpses of which books of poetry might be coming soon within the editors’ favoured aesthetic styles. It’s part of the process that some poems aren’t chosen. The ones not in this volume, for instance. You could make other volumes for the year that would include them and leave these ones out. 

In other words, “Best Canadian Poetry 2026” has little to do with “Best” or “2026,” but is one thread of a conversation that has continued (for, what, 30 years?) and has gone on further by the time you read this book. We are just dipping a cup into a stream.

Dalton (Interrobang) explains her interests and her approach in her introduction. “I aimed to read without program,” she writes, “without preference for particular poetics, region, gender, age, or ethnicity—not with the territorial sweep of the eye but sniffing and snuffling along [like a star-nosed mole, she tells us] for the spoor of the genuine.” 

This is a book of spoor! Presumably, if we track it, we get to “the genuine.” Dalton hints at what that might be by quoting the American poet Edward Hirsch: “The lyric poem exists somewhere in the region—the register—between speech and song.” It’s a good hint as to what you find here: a particular kind of voice, in a particular musical presentation, in a largely North American context. 

What you won’t find here is complex structures of words defying lyric’s grip. Maybe it’s because it’s not Dalton’s goal to find them. Maybe it’s not the kind of work that usually comes out of creative writing apprenticeships. Maybe there’s something Canadian about such choices. Whatever the case, the book is an interesting record of the pressures that publication in the twenty-first century applies to something as disparate as poets. 

There are many BC poets here—about a quarter of the total. The lyric drive is alive and well on this side of the mountains. Of course. This has been an extraordinarily British place camped out on Indigenous space since 1845. In terms of anti-lyric, there’s more than half a century of the whole Vancouver School, here, too, with roots just as American as Hirsch’s lyricism.

That American connection is pan-Canadian. Consistent themes in the anthology, from whatever province the poems travel, are “borders” and “crossing borders”—and the isolation, transformation, and estrangement they create. 

The anthology provides a vital aesthetic service by showing community across all this difference. We need this stuff; for one, because contemporary literature is largely defined as “novels.” Storytelling is big. It has such cultural force that it even shows up in the bulk of these fifty lyrics, even though narrative is not precisely a lyric thing. 

To set that thought in relationship to power, just look at in reverse. Lyric interventions in fiction are delightful when rising through the linguistic textures of narrators and characters, yet hurt narratives and characters when they are used to manipulate plots. 

Travel the other way, from fiction to verse, is equally delicate. The lyric parallel to a plot skipped by intensified lyrical moments is the surprise ending—the things pulled out of the blue that make a crowd laugh with recognition and win applause, yet rarely carry well in text itself. Texts are read with far more irony.

Best Canadian Poetry 2026 is a bundle of poems that crossed this line well. Their lyric bridges, the ones that risk making stories fail, allow story to add texture to transformation here as they witness, affirm and erase borders.

The most purely lyric poems in the classic Canadian sense—that existed before Creative Writing took over the game late in the last century—are A.F. Moritz’s “Quibble With Hegel” and John Reibetanz’s “Clams.” Their density is the work of a lifetime. Erin Mouré’s “Flourish (May 2022)” updates that culture in the style she distilled from it in the 1990s and continues to extend. 

The rest of the poems come from a different culture. They are largely stand-up presentations and stories of the North American self and its struggles to present itself in public without disappearing in a crowd. I think you could easily read that as trying to stay Canadian while keeping your head out of water in a North American sea. BCP2026 is a good toolkit.

The poems from BC writers approach these tensions a bit differently than most of the others. Many read like Kojoti tales, with a trickster self at heart. Some are Indigenous. Some aren’t. They all combine well with the other Indigenous works in the anthology. Add a few others in the same vein, and you have about half the book.

Perhaps the concentration of this work in BC is because things that are universal across the country areveryimmediate here. European culture in BC began deeply embedded in Indigenous cultures, which still own the land and water in ways Canada as a whole won’t until it reconciles with them.

The poets seem to be there already. Interestingly enough, if you dip into The Northwest Review, that literary magazine out of Seattle, Vancouver’s American twin, the number of Native American poems published in it, most from the Southwest, leap out. Their modes sit easily with the Indigenous and trickster work in this anthology.

Maybe it’s something about living on the edge of things. Maybe we know stuff about borders out here. Maybe our history is shared. Maybe it’s the land and water. It doesn’t matter. The work is being done. 

Take Megan Morrison’s “Some Questions” as an example, as it playfully works alongside the beat of a silent drum: 

Is this the preferred version of me.
Am I usually wrong about things.
Would it change things, knowing this.

Or Estlin McPhee’s “Gay Messiah,” in which

            Jesus brings out a cauldron,
travel-size, and lights up
a fire in it, tells us to burn
what no longer serves us.

This pure trickster tale ends with a trick of sudden awareness and awe I won’t spoil for you. There’s also Jennifer Gossoo’s portrait of her grandmother, “Nôhkom,” set in the Nicola River Valley:

Nôhkom explains about the valley hoodoos:
Men and women turned to earth by the Creator.
My teacher tells it different: erosion and sediment rock.
I like how Nôhkom tells it better.

And from across the Rockies? Well, there’s John O’Neill’s “The News,” with its unflinching gaze at duplicity, that ends with a human voice shouting “like a coyote or wolverine / at a kill or killing / the most human sound / she sings to deny.”

There’s Henry Heavyshield, as well, from Blackfoot country, with “Storytelling for Young Warriors,” with its refreshing “i am not listening to stories. i am filling my quiver.” And its “we don’t capture horses anymore. we raid bookshelves. / when the corral is full, we give them away.”

The poem itself, which Heavyshield gives us, is a series of these shelves. Its stanzas are these horses, and he gives us them to ride.

This anthology is a herd of these. I’ve concentrated on the ones from BC. This is, after all, The BC Review. There are other lineages to pull from the corral, though, taking different approaches to shared issues of Canada’s place in the world. 

This is not a settled time. I suggest we take heart that the poets, and the book, are not so much settlers here as unsettlers, although with a catch: the tone is comic overall, in the sense of bringing together what shouldn’t have been apart. 

For that revelation of the poetic state of the nation, we are in debt to Mary Dalton’s generosity and her eye snuffling along like the nose of a star-nosed-mole.

Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has reviewed recent books by Gary Geddes, Tom McGauley, W.H. New, Stephanie Bolster, Lorne Daniel, Sharron J. Simpson, Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, and Hari Alluri for BCR. His newest volume, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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