Another Mountain to Climb by Danny Peart Vancouver: Milagro Press, 2017 $25.00 / 9780994932914 Reviewed by Isabella Wang First published Aug. 20, 2018 * Danny Peart’s third book of poetry, Another Mountain To Climb, is an open window into Peart’s exhilarating excursions up the peaks of Grouse Mountain and Kilimanjaro. One simply has to open…
Read more #346 Called to the poethood
Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots by Erín Moure Vancouver: New Star Books, 2017 $21.00 / 9781554201419 Reviewed by Claire Sicherman First published April 19, 2018 * It is three weeks after the death of her former lover, Paul Émile Savard, when author Erín Moure learns he is dead, and that he died alone…
Read more #290 Grieving with Google
MEMOIR: Endpiece: Recalling New Orphic by Margrith Schraner First published April 13, 2018 * Here Margrith Schraner recalls her twenty years as Associate Editor of The New Orphic Review of Vancouver and Nelson. “I now conceive of ‘Endpiece’ as a caboose—a railway wagon attached to the end of a train. The lights at the back…
Read more #286 New Orphic Review bookend
A Temporary Stranger: Homages, Poems, Recollections by Jamie Reid Vancouver: Anvil Books, 2017 $18.00 / 9781772140989 Reviewed by Andrew Parkin First published April 4, 2018 * In a posthumously published collection by Vancouver poet Jamie Reid (1941-2015), there are poems of homage to a number of famous French poets from Baudelaire to Apollinaire, including Reverdy,…
Read more #281 Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Jamie
From Oral to Written: A Celebration of Indigenous Literature in Canada, 1980-2010 by Tomson Highway Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2017 $29.95 / 9781772011166 Reviewed by Deanna Reder First published March 30, 2018 * Eminent Cree author Tomson Highway’s From Oral to Written, released by Talonbooks in 2017, is beautifully flawed, inspiring the reader with tremendous lists of…
Read more #277 The new turf of Indigenous Lit
First published Feb. 9, 2018. The tradition of printers supporting the literary arts is a very long one. Before there were trade publishing companies in British Columbia, the two major progenitors for books made in the province were Morriss Printing in Victoria and Mitchell Press in Vancouver. Mitchell Press still exists, although their headquarters is…
Read more #245 Publish and cherish
First published Feb. 1, 2018. Trailer Park Elegy by Cornelia Hoogland Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2017. $18.95 / 9781550178159 Reviewed by Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes Trailer Park Elegy is not Cornelia Hoogland’s first book-length long poem. Her Woods Wolf Girl (Wolsak & Wynn, 2011), for instance, is a Canadianized, modern retelling of Little Red Riding…
Read more #242 A brotherly love revisited
Refugium: Poems for the Pacific by Yvonne Blomer (editor), with a foreword by Adam Olsen Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017 $22.95 / 9781987915532 Review by Phyllis Reeve First published Dec. 21, 2017 * What is a Refugium? Yvonne Blomer, editor and guiding spirit of this anthology, borrows her definition from the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as…
Read more #227 Specific to the Pacific
First published No. 22, 2017. Ask someone to name B.C.’s most popular poet and you might hear names such as Earle Birney, bill bissett, Patrick Lane, Susan Musgrave, Dorothy Livesay… None match the fervour of adoration this province felt for Robbie Burns–as Fred Braches recalls upon rediscovering a little-known book about the Burns statue in…
Read more #206 Robbie Burns remembered
A GATHERING TO REMEMBER AND HONOUR PETER TROWER WILL BE HELD FROM 3 – 6 PM AT THE FORMER LOCATION OF THE RAILWAY CLUB IN VANCOUVER ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25. THE VENUE IS NOW CALLED THE RAILWAY STAGE AND BEER CAFE. IT’S AT 579 DUNSMUIR. Peter Trower, one B.C.’s most beloved poets, has died at…
Read more #201 Peter Trower (1930-2017)
Spindrift: A Canadian Book of the Sea by Michael L. Hadley and Anita Hadley (editors), with illustrations by Matthew Wolferstan Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2017 $36.95 / 9781771621731 Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski First published Nov. 6, 2017 * This is an anthology with something like a mission. In “Waypoints,” his foreword to this anthology, historian…
Read more #196 Batten down the anthology
Auguries by Clea Roberts London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2017 $20.00 / 9781771314510 Reviewed by David Stouck First published October 24, 2017 * Two-time Governor General’s Award winner Don McKay described Clea Roberts’ debut collection of poems, Here Is Where We Disembark (Freehand Books, 2010), as “exquisite frost-bitten brevities,” a phrase that aptly characterizes this Yukon-based…
Read more #188 Spooked horses in a storm
Blaise Cendrars Speaks… by Blaise Cendrars. Edited and with an introduction by Jim Christy, translated by David J. MacKinnon Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2016 $24.95 / 9781771711906 First published in Paris by Denoël, 1952 and 2016 Reviewed by Serge Alternês Review first published Oct. 16, 2017 * This upcoming Remembrance Day we might recall and commemorate…
Read more #183 Modernist poet Blaise Cendrars
ESSAY: Kipling on Vancouver Island by John F. Bosher First published October 11, 2017 * Rudyard Kipling’s first visit to the Pacific coast of British Columbia was in 1889 in the course of his journey from India via Japan and the U.S.A. to London with every intention of making a literary name for himself. He…
Read more #178 Kipling on Vancouver Island
Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine by Meghan Bell (editor) and curated by the Growing Room Collective: Meghan Bell, Terri Brandmueller, Candace Fertile, Taryn Hubbard, Chelene Knight, Lindsay Glauser Kwan, Cara Lang, Alissa McArthur, Navneet Nagra, Bonnie Nish, Rachel Thompson, Kayi Wong, and Lisa Xing Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017 $24.95 / 9781987915402 Reviewed…
Read more #168 Forty years of making room
Jim Wong-Chu (1949-2017) An obituary by Alan Twigg First published Aug. 15, 2017 * Chinese Canadians weren’t granted the federal vote in Canada until 1947 and they first voted provincially in 1949–the year Jim Wong-Chu was born in Hong Kong on January 28th. Jim Wong-Chu was brought to Canada, aged four, in 1953 where he…
Read more #154 Jim Wong-Chu (1949-2017)
The Way of Tanka by Naomi Beth Wakan Brunswick, Maine: Shanti Arts Publishing, 2017 $20.00 / 9781941830604 Reviewed by Phyllis Reeve First published June 8, 2017 * Born in England in 1931, Naomi Deutsch come to Canada in 1954 and worked as a psychotherapist in Toronto. She and her second husband Elias, who married in…
Read more #136 It takes one to tanka
Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine by Meghan Bell (editor) and curated by the Growing Room Collective: Meghan Bell, Terri Brandmueller, Candace Fertile, Taryn Hubbard, Chelene Knight, Lindsay Glauser Kwan, Cara Lang, Alissa McArthur, Navneet Nagra, Bonnie Nish, Rachel Thompson, Kayi Wong, and Lisa Xing Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017 $24.95 / 9781987915402 Reviewed…
Read more #130 The making of Making Room
First Published March 6, 2017 REVIEW: Oscar of Between: A Memory of Identity and Ideas by Betsy Warland Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2016. $21.95 / 978-1-987915-16-7 Reviewed by Catriona Sandilands * In 2007, Betsy Warland took a birthday trip to London for a range of plays and events, including an exhibition on military camouflage at…
Read more #99 Opening the Oscar envelope
Two of the unsung heroes of B.C. literature, Ernest Hekkanen and Margrith Schraner, began The New Orphic Review, a bi-annual journal of fiction, poetry, reviews and essays in 1998 when they had just turned fifty-one. “To create a product of no obvious practical value,” Hekkanen writes in the penultimate issue, “and for which there would be…
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