Some volumes of poetry offer bold innovation, while others do the work of careful consolidation. Toronto poet John Reibetanz’s fourth collection of poems, Mining for Sun, is a sterling example of the second kind of book. As the title suggests, Reibetanz is no poetic Icarus, tempting fate with unlikely flights. Instead these poems stick closer to the ground. They find their vision by working the familiar vein of everyday perceptions, nurtured by impeccable craft in the tradition of poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Wilbur.

Of the volume’s four sections, the first two focus predominantly upon childhoods either remembered or observed from a parent’s perspective. The third section delves into history, both personal and continental. “Threads,” for example, wonders at the European ravaging of the Inca civilization’s ancient fabric, asking readers to “Think of scraping the paint/ off a Rembrandt/ to make a nice canvas mat” and to “imagine melting/ a culture/ merely to get/ lumps of raw metal.”

The book’s final section returns to the city streets – to “King Street’s dried-up riverbed.” The final poems press the question raised throughout the collection: what nourishment does art provide? For an answer, Reibetanz points to the “two kinds of special” visible in a bakery window. One is the “edible architecture,” the other, a trick of light, a reflection of the street outside that “can’t be bought or eaten” but which, as the poem “Daily Bread” suggests, “feeds/ a hunger no daily bread can fill: for light.” In Reibetanz’s food guide, there’s a recommended daily allowance of the light of imagination. Reibetanz may be working with poetic recipes that blend language and experience in ways that date back to Yeats’ Byzantium poems and beyond, but he serves them up here with refined skill and immaculate presentation.