The art of pausing

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Mildred Tremblay

Canadian poet Tremblay reflects on the nature of dying and death. Her subjects include old men and younger brothers, sisters and mothers, as well as reflections on the deaths inflicted by murderous cats. Tremblay writes with humour and insight about the perils of religion and the powerful connection between sex and soul. The thing about dying is/I won't get over it.//I can't say, well/that sure taught me a lesson--/let's go home and have a drink./Impossible to believe/in my own ending.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sonnets from the Portuguese, first published in 1850, is a collection of forty-four love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The poems largely chronicle the period leading up to her marriage to Robert Browning.

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Medbh McGuckian

Generous selections from each of Medbh McGuckian's five books serve as an introduction to this gloriously gifted- and pioneering - poet, as a stock-taking moment to reconsider her luxuriant constructions, and as a welcome occasion to learn further how to receive the signals of her opulent imagination. The sensual, rhapsodic implications of her early work and the engagement of more recent poems with the politics of her native province represent a convincing vision. Selected Poems marries intellectual and emotional courage with vital language, startling but appropriate images, and beguiling art.

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Jean Gallagher

"This Minute is a connected whole, in which the verse is driven by strong intellectual excitement, evident in the energetic movement of the lines and in a vocabulary that switches easily from the colloquial to the exact. There is an urgent voice, felt close at hand. And there is a skill in handling and matching the size of a poem to its subject that makes each invigorating to read - one arrives slightly out of breach. These poems are luminous, discovering rather than manufacturing their metaphors as the most exact way of speaking."--Jacket.