Wide slumber in Globe 100

Wide slumber's listed in the Globe 100, published in yesterday's Books Section. Here's the poetry excerpt.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL: POETRY
The Globe 100: The ninth edition of the top books of the past year

Liar, by Lynn Crosbie, Anansi
Lynn Crosbie recollects her seven years of life with another poet, not in tranquillity, but with excoriating reproof. This depiction of a folie à deux is a book-length poem whose long lines and many words are accommodated by wide
pages and small type. Remarkably little is said about sex, but a lot about everything else that can go wrong in the unmade beds of a romantic partnership. Throughout, Liar's energy is impressively sustained, the cadences assured, the line turns expert, the barbed images exact. -- Fraser Sutherland

Momentary Dark: New Poems, by Margaret Avison, McClelland & Stewart
Margaret Avison's work belongs to the line of great religious poetry from the Hebrew Bible to Rumi to George Herbert. Her poetry is prayer and praise. Though she's fully aware of human evils, and of how fragile are the shelters we build for ourselves, she doesn't wrestle with such perennial primary mysteries as why, for indiscernible purposes, a loving God makes His creatures suffer so abundantly -- and through no fault of their own. But with poetry of this quality, it would be churlish to complain. -- Fraser Sutherland

Strike/Slip, by Don McKay, McClelland & Stewart
This work from Don McKay is an astonishing exploration of a concern that has
increasingly informed his poems and essays: how to live responsibly in relation
to nature. He remains as joyously intoxicated as ever with the natural world,
and committed to the fraught but necessary enterprise of paying homage to its
inhabitants in language. He affirms the interconnectedness of all things in
poems that argue gracefully for a passionate response to the world we inhabit. -- Margo Wheaton

Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, by a. rawlings, Coach House
"A hoosh a ha." These not-quite-words float in the middle of a blank page. On the next page, "a hoosh a ha" is scattered five times. The last page of the section is nearly black with these onomatopoeic brushes of wings. Wide Slumber then moves through six sections that explore states of sleep in counterpoint with the life cycle of butterflies and moths. That juxtaposition is interesting enough, but rawlings's ability to reproduce the frankly copulative energy pulsing through both worlds is often breathtaking. This is one cool collection, a fresh combination of unashamedly brainy and unabashedly horny. -- Sonnet l'Abbé

Airstream Land Yacht, by Ken Babstock, Anansi
As Auden was to the English 1930s, Ken Babstock is to the Canadian 2000s: the key figure of the under-40s generation, around which other younger poets circle or swoon. Part of what makes Airstream Land Yacht perhaps the most important poetry book yet from any Canadian born in the 1970s or beyond is its verbal glee. Poet-critic Carmine Starnino has demanded that Canadian poetry be written in a style lucid, energetic and enlivened by a sense of tradition. Well finally, someone has. -- Todd Swift

Inventory, by Dionne Brand, McClelland & Stewart
War in the early 21st century streams through flickering yet persistent TV screens in Dionne Brand's book. Inventory pushes into intentional violence, staring at the seeming endlessness of humans' capacity to kill one another. Opening oneself to that capacity can lead to anger and numbness, which Brand explores. It is also a register of possible responses from those living at a geographic remove from the death-lists. The book is damning without being superior, sorrowful without falling into self-pity, joyful without becoming naive. -- Meg Walker

Swithering, by Robin Robertson, Anansi
Robin Robertson is a straight-ahead naturalist, coming simply to the task of capturing his subject, with the force and discipline of a master and the precision of a keen, fearless sensitivity that risks declaring: This has weight. His command of metaphor stuns. His simple language collides against itself in such sparks that the reader must nod, or sigh, at the immediacy of his images. Yet what sets him apart is his ability to capture, in longer pieces, strange, unmeasurable paces and the feel of vast, dark currents of energy, as in weather, or time. -- Sonnet l'Abbé

The Anatomy of Keys, by Steven Price, Brick Books
Steven Price, a young B.C. poet, has imaginatively recounted Houdini's life in a gripping volume that travels through a mind stricken by his parents' deaths to the point where the idea of escape becomes the driving image: the pilgrimage, the grail. It is a psyche that is always a part of a body, and a body always part of its own ending. This dark, compelling book may have you looking over your shoulder for something lurking in a dark corner. There is a poetic adroitness here so knowing that it often hits you only afterward how deliciously chosen each syllable has been. -- Patrick Watson