Shannon Webb-Campbell’s latest poetry collection, Re:Wild Her, is inhabited by an otherworldly narrator – part mystic, part pagan, part cool auntie, part It girl, all the way feminist goddess. The dedication itself indicates the tone and intention of the book, “for the wild ones, ruled by winds, water, and beauty.” Feminine and feminist in every regard, the poems are saturated with mysticism and the sumptuous.

The collection is divided into three sections. The first section, Wild Life, promises the start of a journey, with an ekphrasis on Deschamps’s works, and an overall sultry experience. We arrive in Paris, teeming with the sights and smells of the banks of the Seine, a belle époque revival, all the sacred and profane beauty of the city. The French flair for eros couples with the esoteric cosmology of astrology, the pagan calendar, divination methods, and mythos. A delicious romp!

Webb-Campbell muses on the ways to break free of containment. In the long opening poem, “Her Eros Restored,” the architecture of both garments and buildings restrain, “I need to break the glass … smash the patriarchy,” followed by, “I am strapped inside the opera house / on a boat ride of toil-and-trouble woes.” Escape here, though, is more a longing than an attainment. Eros, the apostrophe of the poem, is an unrequited and necessary lover.

As she moves to the second section, Connections, the location changes and an intimacy with landscape emerges. She observes, “you’re leaning out your portal / to watch a branch dance / trying to grasp weather patterns / practise urban forest bathing / in a winter storm surge // looking out to Atlantic, gawking / you wonder how to begin again—.” Identity and knowledge, and how those are embodied, are Webb-Campbell’s fixations. She finds intimacy through clear and earthy details, “foggy lichen under your fingernails / rocks peeling back the ocean floor,” and maintains a clear connection to root aspects of the feminine divine: maiden, woman, crone. Her Indigenous roots are evident, too, in translation of traditional ways of knowing and with historic touchstones.

The one weak poem in the collection is found in this section: “My Moon, My Man” doesn’t attain the heights of her best writing, leaning too heavily on the words of others and cliché images. However, Webb-Campbell recovers nicely.

The third section, Recovery, reflects botanical themes. Verdant images tumble one over the other in another long poem, “How do I reach for the wild (Three Graces).” Images are embodied as elemental ecology poems that reference healing, music, and wellness. They speak of ties to hedge-witchery and wilderness: “here we cut lupins to place them in glass jars / my grandmother thought flowers were a waste / how else can we bring a sense of the wild into ourselves?” Connections to the earth are bountiful and represent a necessary optimism.

Re: Wild Her is a succulent collage of place, identity, knowledge, and divination. It represents a full personality and voice infused with complexity, elemental beauty, and magic. Containment is denied through earthy feminine connections to organic knowledge. At the heart of this book there’s a deep celebration of being alive, of discovery, and of sensuality revealed through sublime images and vivid details that delight. And it’s freeing. “The women wanted rooms / then they felt confined / later they wanted tides.” Webb-Campbell celebrates the sacred feminine throughout and delivers a romantic and optimistic viewpoint in this charming and sublime collection.