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From Atlantic Books Today 99, spring 2024

By E.R. Zarevich

Atlantic Books Today makes it a point to keep its readers well informed on all the exciting new publications coming out of the Eastern provinces of Canada. It is proud to present and recommend three new accomplishments by Canadian creatives that have graced bookshelves this spring. They each offer a refreshing reading experience to accompany this year’s promised bout of warm weather and blossoming greenery. They also make choice, if belated, studies for this year’s Poetry Month in April, which is already shaping up to be a fruitful one for the nation.

All three books are written in free verse and offer a meticulously well-crafted and specialized representation of each author’s personality and worldly experiences. First in the lineup comes courtesy of the Island Studies Press. This is A Skeptic in Springtime, the latest turnout by Brent MacLaine, a university professor of at the University of Prince Edward Island. MacLaine is the author of the previously published Prometheus Reconsiders Fire, and he once again revisits the theme of deep psychological consideration of formative life events, both mythological and human.

MacLaine’s A Skeptic in Springtime covers everything from the imperial Song dynasty in China to the Lamassu, the Assyrian (now Mesopotamian) deities of protection. Even the long deceased French painter Claude Monet makes an appearance, pondering how his paintings ended up hanging in so many clinic waiting rooms. There are also affectionate tributes to his good friend John Smith, who has sadly passed on, but continues to motivate MacLaine’s work with the inspiration only providable by a muse.

MacLain spoke to Atlantic Books Today about the background of the book’s completion, which combines professional practicality with his form of gentle spirituality.

“The book was a long time in the making — some of the poems were written over five years ago. One result is that, perhaps, the poetry has benefited from a longer than usual gestation and editing. More generally, I think that the poems in this collection follow the larger pattern of my previous books: roughly an equal distribution of poems rooted in a familiar, local (pastoral) landscape — gardens and fields are prominent — and poems that range farther afield to events and images drawn from the ramblings of the imagination or international news and travel. In other words, home and away.”

Consider this excerpt from MacLaine’s “Album Leaves: an Elegy,” written particularly for his dedicatee John Smith. This quote from the poem especially resonates to an audience still reeling from the cultural phenomenon that was last year’s Oppenheimer. MacLaine, in his own manner, also humanizes the mysterious, eccentric, almighty scientist utterly absorbed in their work. They were just a person too:

“You speak of physics class at U of T,
of how you walked across the quad
with Leopold Enfold, colleague of Einstein.

‘Enfold’ you remember, ‘once got ‘stuck’
when writing out an intricate equation.
But the next day, he came back to it.

‘I asked him once:
‘Are you a determinist?’
He replied that, before the event,
he believed in free will, but after the event, well,
he tended to be a determinist.’”

Newfoundland and Labrador publisher Breakwater Books has brought out the brilliantly titled The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman by Agnes Walsh. A native of the province, and a seasoned poet with numerous publications on her record, Walsh through her new book strives to dig to her bare roots. Her womanhood and her steady relationship with her provincial and famously lush surroundings, presented raw and fresh like newly harvested crop, are at the centre of this calm and forthright collection. The world and its wonders are not just the background, they are constant companions propping up every troubled soul.

“It was written over several years, mostly when I was living out along a rugged shoreline in rural Newfoundland,” Walsh commented, when asked about her own unique writing process. “The poems mostly come from observing nature and trying to find my place in it while getting on in years.”

Walsh’s poetry examines the overpowering presence of nature even in the face of personal tragedy and modern-day occurrences. Secular matters will always take second place in scope to natural splendor, which offers distraction, solace, and the opportunity to pause and self-reflect on one’s circumstances. Here is an excerpt from her “Driving into the Waves,” which demonstrates exactly this disparity between what is seemingly grounded and what is not, and what really deserves one’s attention the most:

“Driving into the waves of clouds,
the altocumulus, static as if frozen,
as if stuck in mud.
So much sky, so much ocean . . .
the line between them
a dulled, quivering mirage.

And why does spring look like autumn?
Even the green is really a pale yellow,
the trees black, the air biting
every inch of bare flesh.

It’s hard to be happy lately.
You mock yourself
for that last stab at love—
There wasn’t even a slam of the door
as you left in the night.”

Finally, we have Matthew Walsh’s Terrarium, published by ice house poetry. Walsh, another Nova Scotia-hailer and traveller who now resides in Toronto, utilizes their poetry as a means for navigating life as a queer individual in a twenty-first century Canada that is ever progressing, but still politically imperfect.

Walsh’s prose style is unpretentious and engagingly cheeky, and not afraid to poke fun at the modern-day conveniences and concerns which often border on the ridiculous. He allows his own sense of humour to fully shine through and isn’t shy about sharing intimate details about his love life. Here is an excerpt from Walsh’s “Bluet,” a textual near-comedy sketch which demonstrates some of his intriguing takes of contemporary literary lifestyles, relationships, and the new vocabulary words that would have never appeared in poetry volumes in the past:

     “A book of poetry astonished me I forgot
        it was a book not Instagram Messenger
        as if the poet
        was typing to me personally
        I went home and ate a strawberry sundae
        feeling my cynicism
        about things that are asked of me to complete
        and it leaves me
        My friend said I was so naïve
        he saw me in a cult
        and he felt like he was jealous of my happiness
        something not created by myself
        but secretions and I am told serotonin.”

This excerpt from his “Moonstone” demonstrates how Walsh effectively finds the romantic in the everyday, even in industrial settings, a common practice among resourceful city-bound poets.

      “In a repair shop I kiss a mechanic
        in front of several mirrors
        inside True Centre Muffler and Care
        and it is similar to therapy
        All the versions of me go on forever
        I like the image of how art is here
        and the scent of oil
        how things are fixed here.”

All three books are readily available for purchase online. Happy reading!

E.R. Zarevich is a writer and teacher from Burlington, Ont., whose research has appeared in Women in Higher Education, Jstor Daily, Russian Life, and The Calvert Journal, among others.