Spending the year with new(ish) books by friends, locals, and other Canadian poets old and new. Follow along daily on BlueSky and Instagram.

The thing I want to focus on in this week’s micro-review is Trisia Eddy’s sense and description of the land:

“When I lie on the ground the earth hums,”

From the poem ‘Wildflowers throb in the riverbeds’ this line directly follows the ones I highlighted on socials earlier this week. See the gallery below for that image. This poem is the key to the entire book. Wild horses are the way Trisia connects to that which is bigger. This poem, this line speaks directly to my own upbringing in the bush. My experience was more about the trees than the wildlife though. In the back country of the Eastern Kootenays, the wildlife you were most likely to encounter, aside from birds, was bears. The place was lousy with them and you didn’t really go out deliberately looking for them. The only thing that outnumbered the bears were the trees. And they made their own music. Spoke to you in ways similar to the ways horses speak to Trisia. I think this book will speak directly to a time when you lied down on the grass and just…opened to it all.

There, that is my review for this week. Reading Trisia Eddy Woods’s book is like lying down in the grass. You should try it.

This is what drove my creativity these past two weeks. I became, among other things, Horses: