Best Canadian Poetry 2025: Part One
A Poetry Review by Michael Greenstein
In her “Foreword” to the 2025 edition of Biblioasis’s Best Canadian Poetry 2025, Anita Lahey begins with a description of the Canadian prairie as a “flat aching heart,” which captures the sense of loss and grief in many of the fifty poems that follow. Against and within the true north strong and free, a flat aching heart beats and arrests our attention in the poems selected by Aislinn Hunter. Although such voices as Margaret Atwood, A. F. Moritz, and Michael Ondaatje are noticeably absent, the richness and variety of so many younger and established poets make this collection exceptional.
Lahey’s “How to Let Poems Be” includes a poem from Hunter’s Linger, Still: “How clear it is here / in the filigreed cloud of this / ancient bedding, / to see that being born is the rarity -- .” Lahey’s and Hunter’s clarity lingers in these long e’s – the pedigree and filigree embedded in poetry – that navigate em-dashes of marvels, arrivals, domestic details, cosmic significance, and the flat aching heart of birth and rebirth. To linger, still is to seek the filigree in the stacked heart of all of these poems, not only Hunter’s “Northwestern Salamander Eggs Preserved in a Jar.” The fifty poems are acts of preservation in many senses. Hunter’s “Introduction” shares the pain of her husband’s terminal illness and his request for poetry. With pandemic as background, these poems demonstrate an ethic of care curated in “sly work, sounding both artful and unrehearsed.” How to let poems bewilder: if the reach of metaphor strains to overreach, if personal pronouns blur identities, if thought strays from sense, and if caring ethic yields to daring aesthetic, then the reader grapples with how to let poems be.
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s long, prosaic title introduces the first poem in this volume: “According to the CBC, Indigenous Peoples Are Demonstrably More Vulnerable to Illness and Disease, Live 15 Years Less Than Other Canadians.” The poet writes in capital letters on all his neighbourhood trees: “UP CLOSE AN NDN / IS A DEMONSTRABLE IMPOSSIBILITY.” The poem swings between near-sighted vision and longer distances. NDN stands for not dead native and sounds like Indian; demonstrable contains monster in its roots; and impossibility introduces a series of negative prefixes – unfreedom, unclaimable, and the final unconquerable. Belcourt’s country is split between Indigenous and settler visions – the latter “a blurry beast / roaming too close to the horizon.” Opposed to the CBC’s story is his grandmother’s myth and truth, her words in italics running counter to the earlier capitalized words: “If heaven is a place, my dear, / I’m afraid it's already underwater.” Belcourt is doubly displaced both in Canada and in his stay in the UK.
The next poem, Miranda Pearson’s “Bridestones,” is set in England, beginning with an epigraph from Ted Hughes’s poem about the same place: “You do nothing casual here.” The Bridestones are a group of millstone-grit rocks in West Yorkshire that inspire both poets in their causal and un-casual relationships. “High on the Pennine Moor, / an outcrop of stones – a congregation.” Pearson joins Hughes’s repeated congregation: “Crowding congregation of skies. / Tense congregation of hills. / You do nothing casual here.” Pearson sculpts these stones with “their elephant boulder-memory.” This hyphenated boulder-memory highlights her couplets and the bolder memory of “A woman’s place, on the edge,” after Hughes’s place. Hyphens carry through the rest of the poem as the woman’s place shifts from the edge to the centre, the Bridestones calibrated in careful punctuation, caesuras that capture geological formations. The opening aspirated “High” recurs in the next stanza: “Here are hags, giant frozen waves, / their sky-holes and hollows.” Pearson’s carving rhythms freeze and wave, fill and hollow out.
The poem sculpts these stones and establishes a relationship between the speaker and her friend, between the poet and her precursor, from history and the flight of birds above the Pennine Moor. She motions time and space in her historic landscape: “Here are eons, brief Braille of lichen, / and the years of space between us.” If the eons open up, they are held in check by the brief Braille, touchstones of a sign language through spy-holes. The hiatus between ageing friends: “Words we don’t and / Can’t say, gaps weathered into sculpture.” As the flow of friendship gathers, end stops shift to enjambed couplets: “The fine brush stroke / of our hard-earned lightheartedness.” The hyphen in that oxymoronic hard and light prepares for the next couplet parenthetically inserted without end stop, the spacing indicating the space of time between friends:
(Toad-rock table-rock,
stack and loaf)
The penultimate stanza continues the hyphenation, alternates rhythmic stresses, and echoes the earlier hollows: “Millstone grit, wind-worn heads, / bear, walrus. Hollowed cup-marks and basins.” And the final stanza returns to softer iambs for the lighter brief flight that takes off from tetrameter to trimeter: “tiny birds that sing full-throated / on their risen thrones.” This concluding coronation contrasts with the heavier congregation at the beginning of “Bridestones,” a poem where nothing is casual, and full-throated thrones rebuild “Man’s stone walls straight, and well meant.” Pearson’s fine brush stroke repaints petroglyphs.
(Part Two is here!)
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : Biblioasis (Nov. 12 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 188 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771966327
ISBN-13 : 978-1771966320