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

There are two reasons why I am going to recommend this book to you. The first is that it is a selected collection, a sampling of poems from all eight of Phyllis Webb’s published books. The second is ‘Poetics Against the Angel of Death.’

The best selected collections give you an overview of how a poet developed and evolved over all or part of their writing career, rather than just replaying their greatest hits. Combined with a decent biography, a selected works is a very satisfying journey with a writer – whether it is someone whose work you already admired or if you had only a passing familiarity. Reading across someone’s bibliography also gives you the opportunity to drill down into their career through specific books.

I was familiar with Phyllis Webb through a couple of her poems, including ‘Sitting’ a section of which Patrick Lane used as the epigraph to his book “Winter” which I featured earlier this year on the blog. I was also familiar with her work with CBC on Ideas. If you like taking deep dives into different philosophical, ethical, intellectual topics and haven’t heard of Ideas, I envy the journey of discovery on which you are about to embark. Coming out of this book, I have already added “Naked Poems” to my must by list.

The second reason I am recommending this book to you is so that you can read and reread the poem ‘Poetics Against the Angel of Death’ which comes from Phyllis’s third book “Even Your Right Eye” which is now also on my list. As a writer, every now and then, if you’re lucky, you’ll put down your pen after a writing session knowing that the thing before you is perfect. There is no feeling like it. It feels like hitting a pitch square in the sweet spot, knowing it is out of the yard right off the bat without even needing to look up. You sit back in your chair and trot around the bags, holding on to that feeling as long as you can. As a reader, we can experience that more often. There are some poems that just hit, perfectly. This:

because I want to die
writing Haiku

This is what has been driving my creativity this week: “long lines, clean and syllabic as knotted bamboo. Yes!”