Quill and Quire

Poetry

★ Question & Answer

By Alison Pick

What is the answer?” No answer came. She laughed and said, “In that case what is the question?” (Gertrude Stein) In her debut poetry collection, Question & Answer, Alison Pick takes up Gertrude Stein’s challenge, ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

Missing Children

By Lynn Crosbie

If you write an unflinchingly human portrait of a murderer, are you glamorizing his crimes? That’s the question Lynn Crosbie has posed in four previous poetry collections (most notoriously with her piece of true-crime poetry, ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

The Alchemy of Happiness

By Marilyn Bowering

Alchemy. The word conjures images of medieval laboratories, of quasi-magical transformations, and, perhaps most importantly, of failure. For despite their many important contributions to modern science, the medieval alchemists ultimately failed in their primary goal: ... Read More »

November 20, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

Careful

By Jacqueline Turner

Careful, Jacqueline Turner’s second poetry collection, is partitioned into nine sections, most of which feature short-line, lower-case poems that form lexical stalactites creeping down the left-hand margin of the page. As random words percolate, the ... Read More »

November 20, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

Disarmament

By John Terpstra

The bleak, hopeful town of Hamilton, Ontario – with its steel mills and slowly resurgent parklands – finds an apt poet laureate in John Terpstra. His seventh collection, Disarmament, focuses mainly on the city’s landscapes ... Read More »

November 19, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

Parlance

By Suzanne Zelazo

Though Parlance is her first book-length publication of poetry, Toronto poet Suzanne Zelazo’s name is likely familiar to many through her role as editor of the Queen Street Quarterly. This literary magazine has a reputation ... Read More »

November 11, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

Director’s Cut

By David Solway

Few critics match the moral urgency of David Solway, whose poetry reviews constitute an anti-canon to the literati’s assessment of its own merits. Solway’s debunking of celebrated poets, from Atwood to Zwicky, has earned him ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

Your Last Day on Earth

By Carla Hartsfield

Toronto poet Carla Hartsfield is a true Renaissance woman. Her biography states that she is, by turns, a poet, painter, songwriter, and classical/pop musician. Sometimes, as she demonstrates in her third collection of poetry, Your ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry