Poems that form an eloquent, searching contemplation of "the warp and weft of being and nonbeing." All the Names Between is Nova Scotia poet Julia McCarthy's meditative and crackling-with-dark-energy third collection. From her observation of "long-horned beetles... rearranging the landscape" to an apperception of "part of me /...seeded by dust / of meteors and asteroids," McCarthy makes palpable, in richly layered imagery and with attentiveness that unfolds stillness, the "Singing Emptiness" that informs and quickens the crow's flight, the stones' weight, and our own being as we move in "the defined world both elegant / and maimed." Concerned with both the inadequacy and the necessity of word to convey world, the poems move through a shifting landscape of seasons and creatures, of the remembered dead, and of scattered stones reading the Akashic field. Grounded in the experience of presence, where the external and internal meet, a crossroads of consciousness where "a language without a name / remembers us" and the poem is a votive act, All the Names Between reflects the shadow-light of being, of what is and what isn't, the seen and the unseen, the forgotten and the remembered where every elegy has an ode at its centreevery ode has an elegy around its edges.
