Asking a poet to explain his or her work may result in inscrutable mumbling, a beery confession, or stony silence. And then there’s Sharon Thesen, whose introduction to News & Smoke is one of the most refreshing in years. These are poems from her six books published between 1980 and 1995, as well as other poems collected here for the first time, that concern “feeling awful about this or that, hopeful about this or that.” The Vancouver poet writes in a pretension-free zone, yet her poems are also sophisticated pop art, planting the reader firmly in the mundane but fascinating world.

Much of Thesen’s writing concerns the struggle to make art in the onslaught of everyday events, to make a poem that reflects the world, neither collapsing under nor retreating from its chaos. Poems like “Emergency” acknowledge the uncertainty principle that rules attractions and accidents: “Human love/is not so easy as speech/will allow. All/the forms of it embrace awkwardly/beside the ambulance/& nobody knows what to do.” She fills her poems with urban complaints – alienation, boredom, fear – but reserves her condemnation for easy sentiments, which do not describe reality, but fend it off: “Embarrassing turquoise carnations/at the corner store – perhaps/they dye them to hold something up/against the news. Like bad poetry” (from “Blue Carnations”).

Thesen’s writing is marvelously precise, unpredictable, and often very funny. “We were not abstract,/we were not a video,”she writes in “My Horse and I,” about riding a horse through the perfume department at Eaton’s. Poetry, she says, is about responding to the real world, and constantly rearranging one’s imaginative furniture.

As an editor, Thesen has spent years thinking about her craft, and the result is a bold synthesis of plain speech and esthetic subtlety. It’s clear in her writing, saturated in Vancouver’s rain and scattered with persistent blooms, that she’s found a way to recreate a whole ecology which is awful and hopeful at the same time.