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

If Patrick Lane was the first, then “A Stone Diary” was like the second book of poetry I bought. Published two years after her terrible murder, Pat Lowther’s third book of poetry is literally a touchstone I go back to every few years. I have a very clear memory of my first reading of the opening, eponymous, poem in the collection and how it left me speechless.

Thinking back on it now, it was the metamorphoses that got me. The transformation. The not only becoming other, but becoming inanimate. Like Ovid but real, now, and personal. The book is full of these, full of curled shells, rags of leaves, the swallowing prairie and

The land is what’s left
after the failure
of every kind of metaphor.

This is what has been driving my creativity this week: I became smoother and smoother: