Hugh MacLennan Poetry

A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey – through cities and their outskirts, to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into childhood, and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations. take the harp, take / the Fitbit and the Band-Aid box. Fold the whole / grey sheet of sky, lumpy and unalluring / into your rucksack. A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey – into the past or the present, or toward what we hope and fear for the future. Poems can be journeys of repair and recovery, adventure and discovery. However, even in pandemic times when our journeying is curtailed, or at least confined, when we are abiding in one physical location with chafing and restiveness, we are still travelling. One of those journeys is discovering where language can take us. Maureen Hynes's poems travel through cities and their outskirts to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into early childhood, and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations. The title poem addresses the search for tools and instruments that will "ward off adversity" – tools to help us move forward to our chosen destinations. Take the Compass calls on art and nature as invisible helpers, and on uncountable things – personal values and traits such as courage – to "break the bad news into nine living petals." As with all her collections, Hynes shows a commitment to social justice, to acknowledging historical and contemporary inequities, to the search for sources of remedy, repair, and renewal, and to the sustaining power of love. The variety of poetic forms she has chosen lets this search carry the complexity and seriousness of its themes. "You never know what unpredictable imaginative connections Maureen Hynes will make of earth's challenges in Take the Compass, but you can be certain to leave her poems surprised by a deeper awareness and a clearer vision than you would ever have thought upon entering them. Other people have books on a bedside table; but Hynes has a "silver pillbox" full of ampersands. Her associations unfold in calibrated order, her seriousness tempered by whimsy.Yet the poems in Take the Compass, with their environmental and social concerns, are not surreal. They're grounded in a sure maturity of voice that can twist and turn Hynes's flexible lines into helixes of fresh understanding." Molly Peacock "In a world where 'life's a rough ascent, / an icy path, sometimes a precipice to hang from,' the poems in Take the Compass point the reader to poignancy, compassion, and impish imagination. 'Carry / curiosity and confusion in your hand,' Maureen Hynes writes, and she does so bravely, in poems ranging from childhood to health and her bedside table. If 'We have been too knotted / into death counts & pollen counts / & approval ratings' then Hynes's skilful poems are 'silk or twine or rope for rescue or ascent.'" Kevin Irie "Maureen Hynes welcomes us as an articulate and compassionate friend to a neighbourhood as expansive as human nature itself. Brightness emerges through bleakness: magnolia buds, lapis lazuli, the body a source of renewal, the firm, clear uplift of resistance. These poems are radiant." Susan Gillis Rich and nuanced poems that lead the reader to rivers, city outskirts, pandemic-closed cafés, forests, dream landscapes, daily treasures, and losses. Maureen Hynes, winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the Petra Kenny, Raymond Souster, and Pat Lowther awards, has published six books of poetry. She lives in Toronto.

Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, aboutness is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, this is poetry that refuses to stand still. Impulse said preserve the mess of construction, the unbiblical / carnage. This is my excuse for everything. Intensive and extensive, aboutness convenes across geographies and temporalities, in conversation with interlocutors living and dead, real and imagined. Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, this virgule-infused song of negation is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Marked by digression, asides, qualifiers, and a substructure of endnotes that together create layers of indeterminacy, aboutness takes the reader from Twin Peaks to Ganesh, Roland Barthes to Catullus, blue flamingoes to Ophelia, Agnes Martin to St Augustine. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, this is poetry that resists ossification and refuses to stand still, where the process of production is itself invited to the carnival. A mosaic of moving pieces. Eimear Laffan is an Irish-born writer who lives in Nelson, British Columbia.

In a photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation and, for perhaps a singular moment, assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing. and it was in these bare sands / that you fell, / beloved. When John Baglow's partner Marianne MacKinnon died in 2006, he decided to assemble a new collection of poems in her memory. No one else knew of what proved to be a slow-moving ambition, but a member of the family mentioned one evening that Marianne had appeared in a dream, saying, "Tell John to finish my book." After that, what choice did he have? In a famous photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes, for a magical moment, the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation, arcing and swooping as they will, and for perhaps just a singular moment assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing. Some of these poems, inspired by love, grief, and wonder, have been tucked away for years; others are freshly written. All here find their place. There is no narrative in Murmuration, no chronology. Nor are the many personal remembrances and representations in the book confined to one person. Nevertheless, together they are one way of seeing, one way of being. Marianne would approve. Poems of love, grief, and wonder, moving together in a formation without chronology or narrative, across many years and skies. John Baglow is a writer and researcher living in Ottawa and the author of two previous volumes of poetry.