Lake Nora Arms

Wayne Ray is president of the Canadian Poetry Association and author of
Giants of the North.

Just moments into this book you are lost. Stumbling around on the shore,
you read, “Water claimed so many of us, / our attraction to it was /
pure addiction. Water / laughed it off, saying / HOH HOH HOH.” Then
you’re in Lake Nora Arms (before they tore it down), meeting the
manager “in his yellow tie, who told you his cock bent to the left and
you told him mine did too, and he was nicer to me after that.”

Michael Redhill takes us back to the days of the Lake Nora Arms, where
you could “open the cupboards and discover the history of
paint-jobs.” Love, sex, and history flow through the poet’s
arresting evocation of cottage life: “The docks / lie like fingers
along the shoreline, / holding the water down taut as Cellophane. / Then
a heron takes off, chewing the air.” This is a book to be circulated
among friends.