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

After taking a break for a couple of weeks to help my oldest child set himself up in a new school in a new city in a new province, I’m back this week with a little bit of a departure from my usual fare. Prolific Edmonton poet Alice Major’s new book isn’t a book of new poetry, but a book of essays about poetry – as well as a wide variety of other topics – and it is this wide variety of other topics that forms the heart of this micro-review.

The first attempt I’ll make at describing this book is through the search for belief. As so many of us who were born into a religious tradition, Alice starts with the spiritual. The book cuts right to the hear of the matter in its first line: “‘I don’t get it, said my husband, ‘Why wouldn’t a poet believe in a spiritual dimension?’” And with that the stakes are set. Most of the first half of the book explores this question and Alice shows us how religion shapes a life regardless of the evolution of one’s personal “belief” and where it eventually settles.

Inextricably entwined with the reflection and exploration of faith is the science. Alice is extremely well-read and well-considered on many different flavours of science and how they continue to shape her worldview and her art. There is a lot of science going on here and it is all fascinating.

Another major (ha!) thread pulling this book together is literature. Of particular interest to me were the chapters that touched on Donne and then on Dante. I maintain that both are criminally under-read and their impacts on Western thought and history are far more ubiquitous then they are given credit – but that’s another post for another day.

To prevent this review from moving past my promise to keep it micro, I’m going to finish by talking briefly about curiosity. In addition to the big beats I’ve mentioned, there are literally dozens of references to other sources, inputs, impactions, and inclusions. The notes section alone provides years worth of reading. This is what I love most about this book and why I think you should read it: there is so much that goes into making a creative life. There is a boatload of reading and thinking and feeling the surface of which has been lovingly polished off and presented here as a doorway into your own creativity.

So in addition to the poems I’ve highlighted this past week (and below) this quote from the last chapter, ‘Eternity The Other Night’, of the book is what has been driving my creativity: “I believe the universe is a single thing, one thing, held together by time. Not space, but time”