Craig Poile

Winner, Archibald Lampman Poetry Award and Ottawa Book AwardThese poems chart moments where the beauty of life is glimpsed like a carnival through a crack in a fence. The verse is full of living toys, dressing up, and daylight ghosts. His world is peopled with gods and heroes and inventories the luminous, devastating details of everyday lives. Poile discerns that love is an odd mix of a fairy princess and the monster under the bed. Tracing a firm entry into middle age, Poile favours the expression of a shared experience of the world as opposed to the youthful desire to be unique. He vaults between two worlds: an outer, urban landscape where people raise families, make a living, and get on in the world and an inner terrain of thought and emotion. Metre and rhyme both underscore and undercut Poile's subject matter, and he captivates with texture and sound. Although his work is informed by tradition, his language is grounded in the quotidian, setting up a fruitful dialog between past and present. There are no rules when it comes to making a poem that sings and shimmers.

This collection comes from an alternate world of poetry running close beside our own, one which is always chugging away at shaping meaning and adding substance to our feelings. These poems are usually a study in near-solitude: domestic scenes, Michelangelo's Last Judgement, the myths of Egypt, skaters on the Rideau Canal. The poems don't so much tackle as trip over something like the truth, capturing the moment that brings together art and the observer, history and modern life, fact and fiction. The result is occasional rhyme and traditional forms, snatches of conversation, tiny dramas, painted moments, and an unflagging faith in language and its ability to give us everything we need to learn and know.