With the publication of her second book of poetry, Against Paradise, Edmonton poet Shawna Lamay positions herself within that long literary tradition of English-speaking writers inspired by Venice. The book crosses many genres, blending poetry, travelogue, historical study, and literary criticism to create poems that are, by turns, shimmering and anticlimactic – perhaps not unlike the traveler’s experience of Venice itself.

Lamay’s literary interest in Venice is not surprising, nor is it particularly original. Since the publication of Mandeville’s Travels in the late 14th century, Venice has appealed to the imaginations of writers and artists around the world. Shakespeare set seven of his plays there, while Byron, Wordsworth, and Shelley romanticized the city’s mysterious beauty.

Lamay takes the overwritten reality of Venice as her point of departure. Many of the poems in this collection are written in the voices of literary and artistic figures, particularly women, connected with Venetian history. George Eliot, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Ann Radcliffe, and Alice Monet all make cameo appearances, as does the fictional Renata from Hemingway’s Across the Water and Into the Trees. Other poems resonate with the effects of these historical shadows on contemporary Venice. More conventional travel poems catalogue the better known tourist experience of the city: “Hand with bread./Popular trick, alight on arm/flapflapflap/the stately departure in unison/photograph.”

But though the subjects and themes are familiar, even predictable, Lamay writes with a self-awareness that preserves the book from the worst literary clichés. Lamay acknowledges, by the very palimpsestic nature of her book, that Venice has been charted and charted again – in maps, words, and pictures.

If there is a disappointment here, it is in Lamay’s refusal to dip deeper into these Venetian waters, displaying only the view from the surface and little else. Venice is, as described in Against Paradise, only as light or as dark as its stories, and the voices that tell them: “Paradise, you discovered,/was made of splintered bits of coloured glass/ well lit.”