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The Reflecting Pool
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116 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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March 21, 2013
Vancouver Island writer Maleea Acker's first book, The Reflecting Pool (Pedlar Press, 94 pages, $20), reflects a lineage that includes an MFA from the University of Victoria as well as five summers in remote Alberta firetowers.
In poems that are canny mash-ups of city/travel/nature poetry, Acker touches down in urban Mexico, semi-urban Spain and rural Saskatchewan.
The poems, many of which are built of two-line stanzas, reach for grace, for release, for ways to encapsulate and order the world:
"Ours was the happening in between, / a diffusion of streets into history, an environment // defined by you, unrolling, alleys, not drawn but born."
In the book's third section, however, Acker goes home, writing about her father, a familiar landscape. The well-crafted, well-considered elegance of the earlier poems slips a bit as the poet is forced to contemplate losing her home base:
"Someday my father will die: the place // will be the one I return to the rest of my life, / to recall the sorrow, to swim past dark in its dry husk."
In poems that are canny mash-ups of city/travel/nature poetry, Acker touches down in urban Mexico, semi-urban Spain and rural Saskatchewan.
The poems, many of which are built of two-line stanzas, reach for grace, for release, for ways to encapsulate and order the world:
"Ours was the happening in between, / a diffusion of streets into history, an environment // defined by you, unrolling, alleys, not drawn but born."
In the book's third section, however, Acker goes home, writing about her father, a familiar landscape. The well-crafted, well-considered elegance of the earlier poems slips a bit as the poet is forced to contemplate losing her home base:
"Someday my father will die: the place // will be the one I return to the rest of my life, / to recall the sorrow, to swim past dark in its dry husk."
Displaying 1 of 1 review