My most recent book of poems, The Last Show on Earth is perhaps not a happy book, but happiness is hard won these days. It is, however, a book full of people, as Rob Taylor says in his blurb: “teems not only with names, but with beings.” So, I thought I’d capture a few of the non-Canadians and then dive into Canadian books and writers that inspired this book or inspire me in multiple ways. I want to just say that a lot of the books I will talk about influenced poems already written, and also influence poems that I’m working on now.

International writers include Denise Riley, Mary Oliver, Lorca, Charles Wright (I have fallen in love with his poetry again recently), Virginia Woolf (she’s always kind of floating around), Ilya Kaminski, Anna Akhmatova, Odysseas Elytis, Sylvia Plath, and Rilke. I am aware that Ilya Kaminsky has become particularly called on as Russia invades Ukraine and he is called on to speak to how poetry can respond to war and I am thankful for him and his voice.

Now, here is my more fulsome list of Canadian books I have read over the past while and return to. I just finished a marvellous kids book with my son called Dragons in a Bag, by Zetta Elliot, who is from Canada but lives in the US. We both loved the story and characters and that is my absolutely most recent read.

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Museum of Kindness, by Sue Elmslie

How does one write about the love and profound struggle within raising a child with special needs? Angeline Schellenberg’s Tell Them It Was Mozart and Sue Elmslie’s Museum of Kindness are two books by poets whose words connect me to them through experience, throw me into wide-mouthed awe in how they capture parts of their lives with their unique children.

But Elmslie’s book contains so much more, it is a kind of museum of longing and love; experience and anguish. Divided into four sections, the book touches on youth, risk, the notion of “at least you got a poem out of it,” which is followed by the second section “Trigger Warning,” where her school experiences a shooting that reverberates through the poems and the survivors’ lives. Her third section captures her difficult pregnancy and the birth of her special needs son and those poems ring in me a parallel bell, link me to her via our sons and our common experiences as parents.

In the final section, Elmslie has poems inspired by others with diversities: Glen Gould, Sylvia Plath, Rosemary Kennedy., seeking a Museum of Kindness to which the poem of that title says, “there isn’t one.” I am delighted by the poems in this book for their courage and form, their craft and style, the weaving of experience and metaphor.

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Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis, by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky

There are many books we read cover to cover and others we dip in and out of, read fully but continue to dip into. This book is one of the dippers for me and having just pulled it off my shelf I note it is full of marginalia and ephemera and post-in notes. This is a well travelled and well-read book. It is tiny in size but immense in scope. The book explores the idea of “wild” in Chapter One, authored by Bringhurst, who writes, “The wild is not a portfolio of resources for us or our species to buy and sell or manage or squander as we please.”

In the second section, Zwicky writes of the dark ship we are all on and notions of virtue via Plato. The co-written Afterword touches on optimism and pessimism in which they scrutinize Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and though they may agree that optimism is important they also find that “scholars have both a sacred and practical obligation not to deceive themselves one another nor the public.” Zwicky is not afraid to leave a reader with a dark poem, but these essays and explorations of the human condition under the glare of climate crisis are essential and existential reading.

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TreeTalk, by Ariel Gordon

Despite my understanding and acceptance that we must speak about the dark places and allow ourselves to stay in them, I’m shifting to a less dark place, to the canopy of trees, or one particular tree off The Tallest Poppy restaurant’s patio in Winnipeg where Gordon was part of Synonym Art Consultation residency and stepped onto the tree-shaded patio to speak with, and from, a Boulevard Elm. Ariel wrote poems and fragments to the tree, but she also invited people walking past to do the same. This to me is art creating or enacting connections. People told the tree secrets, confessions, or just praised the tree and the poems. The small, green, hardcover book is a treasure, an artifact of drawn images by Gordon’s step-sister Natalie Baird and quiet treefull moments.

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The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture, by Anita Lahey

I met this marvellous book only a short time before I met its marvellous author. Confession: we are friends. This eclectic collection of essays includes explorations of reading and reviewing, conversations between writers, reviews Lahey wrote as Arc’s editor from 2001-2006, and personal essays on clothespins, her dad who repaired cash registers, and a wrenching memoir piece that later became part of her latest book The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship. The reason this book is on my read-again list is because of Lahey’s sharp eye and her careful consideration of what she wants to say and how best to say it. You can read essays by her also in The Best Canadian Poetry series, of which she is series editor. Lahey is a thoughtful writer and reviewers can learn much by how she approaches her responses to other writers' work.

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Whose Water is it, Anyway? Taking Water Protection into Public Hands, by Maude Barlow

Ooh I love this woman and water warrior. She is phenomenal and her achievements as an author, speaker and water advocate humble me. I heard Barlow speak at The Whistler Writers Festival just as I was editing Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, and I wrote down everything she said, and girded up my courage to ask her for a blurb for Sweetwater at the end of her reading. Whose Water Is It, Anyway? is a how-to book in a way, it speaks to ownership of water, corporate and otherwise, and The Blue Communities Project which is focused on rights to water, water in public hands and the end of single use plastic water bottles. This book is educational and inspiring. It focuses on hope and change not wallowing in how we got to where we are.

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Patrick Lane was a mentor and teacher, nay professor to me for a long time, in some of the poems even in the Last Show on Earth I can hear his voice giving suggestions, see his hand in a lamplit room pacing out the metre. I want to recommend all his books, but will focus on Washita, and Go Leaving Strange. The poems in both books go to dark places with astonishing language and deep pondering focus. I believe the poems in Go Leaving Strange are the field notes he perhaps began as he wrote his memoir written during his first year of addiction recovery, There Is a Season. Patrick Lane died in March of 2019, but still I can picture his hands, “cupped, water slipping like years through my fingers,” from the poem “Ryoanji.”

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Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World’s Environmental Hotspots, by Alanna Mitchell

First I think the span of years I am covering in my suggested reading shows just how long-lived books are, despite the fact that each year new books come out and we must read to keep up. We can read backwards, and forwards forever and still there will be more books.

I confess I read Mitchell’s book a few years ago and have recently picked it up again because a friend got to go and see her perform her Sea Sick play in Vancouver and I am thoroughly jealous and will have to pick up that book as well. Dancing at the Dead Sea inspired me as I gathered poems for Refugium: Poems for the Pacific both in its writing and in the determination of Mitchell and her belief in writing for education, change, and hope for all of us. This book is the offspring of her work at The Globe and Mail and studies at Oxford where she focused on Darwin. She writes, “It is clear that humans have become as powerful a geological force as the four elements of water, air, earth and fire that the ancients believed made up the cosmos. Humans are so numerous, so ravenous, so self-centred a species that we have become the fifth element.”  I use this quote at the beginning of Refugium, but there is so much in this book—history, travel, ecology, hope for change.

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While I’m on enviable travel-based ecological memoir, let me talk for a moment about Jenna Butler’s Magnetic North. Butler was writer in residence for two weeks in 2014 on an ice-class sailing vessel that travelled around the island of Svalbard in Norwegian Arctic. Out of that experience, she created a series of lyrical portraits of the North capturing her time on the boat and the lands it travels to and the boreal forest where she and her partner have created an organic farm in northern Alberta. This is a beautiful series of portraits of place and time and captures ecological shifts, women who work in the places they're anchored and her own body’s experience of being on boat, dinghy and icy land. Jenna Butler was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-fiction just last year for her memoir Revery: A Year of Bees.

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Boundless Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage, by Kathleen Winter

While we are travelling in northern climes I will share this next beloved memoir. Kathleen Winter’s Boundless is a superb book and for me the best part of it is the narrator/main character Kathleen Winter herself. I had to have a friend get this book signed for me when Winter came to Victoria because I was teaching. My copy is full of post-it notes, and ephemera and I have created memoir writing classes using this book as the entire focus for the class.

Like Butler, Winter is invited to board a ship heading north to capture the voyage as a writer. She writes in pure prose, rather than lyrical prose and poetry. And she is a character, by which I mean very funny, very opinionated, quite lively, and fantastically fun. Other characters on this voyage, including scientists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and Indigenous people converse with Winter as they travel from Greenland to Baffin Island.

Winter captures the quiet conversations and the held-fast opinions of those she travels with, but also some of the hard truths of climate change—that polar bears and grizzlies are mating, and that so much ice is melting. “Always be ready to accept an invitation, if it means you get to travel somewhere,” says Denise, a friend of Winter’s at the beginning of the book. Indeed.

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Short Talks, by Anne Carson

I will end with Anne Carson. I love her work and this book—which I heard her say she was proud of and proud of being Canadian at a Vancouver Writers Festival event years ago—is a favourite. Small moments, tiny poems, pithy and smart and fantastic. Having dipped into all these books with travel in them, I will just share a very short poem from this quite tiny book:

Short Talk On The Sensation Of Aeroplane Takeoff

Well you know I wonder, it could be

love running toward my life with its

arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bar-

gain!

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A few of these authors are also friends. If you aren’t reading your amazing friends’ books, I’d like to know why the heck not? We may think we have to be so cautious and careful about biases and celebrating friends work, but I’m so delighted to know some of these writers and to read their work and be dazzled by the intelligence of Canadian writers who also happen to be my friends. Sometimes I might even seek out a person because I have loved their writing.

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Learn more about The Last Show on Earth:

In The Last Show on Earth, Yvonne Blomer gathers the diverse characters and distinct moments from everyday life, its tragedies, and triumphs, and begins to imagine them in a circus as side shows and exhibitions of the unusual. In her latest collection, Blomer borrows from museum dioramas, the paintings of Robert Bateman, and the animal portraits in National Geographic to question and explore the human element in the lives and survival of other species. In poems that are at times unflinchingly dark yet playful, Blomer balances on a tightrope of grief and hope as she traces the lines from motherhood and caring for aging parents to caring for our planet and its endangered creatures—the whale, the elephant, the wolf, the polar bear--as they face ongoing environmental destruction. The Last Show on Earth imagines us all as performers under the bright striped tent or packed on the circus train heading toward an unknown destination.