Miraculous Hours.

The moments and spaces that affect us, shape us, or even change everything, are the stuff of this 2006 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award­–nominated debut collection by Matt Rader, the editor of a literary chapbook imprint, Mosquito Press. Rader’s powerful imagery of the wilderness landscape and the details of a life lived there are honest, raw, disturbing, and also beautiful. He manages to sustain this dialectic of the terrible and beautiful throughout the collection.

Recognized as one of Canada’s up-and-coming new poets, and likened to Michael Ondaatje, Rader probes the tension of human interaction with nature and with one another, revealing these experiences to be more often violent than Edenic. Mapping the way from birth to loss of innocence in his first section (“Exodus”), Rader’s narrative poems move from the accidental death of a kitten and childhood cruelty toward a girl named Missy, to Katie’s rape in the back of Kyle’s pickup truck “while we watched through the canopy window.” In contrast, “Night-Swimmer” captures the sensual pleasure of a summer evening as “your body rings / sluices the river choir sotto voce, / folds me like a prayer for harmony in the water.” Employing birth imagery and metaphors about transitions, Rader attempts a transition of style in the next section (“Breath”), which includes four untitled sparse but precise pieces. Section 3 (“The Land Beyond”) offers a range of style but continues to explore the conflict between wilderness and society where subdivisions, power lines, and cars encroach. At this remote intersection of humanity and landscape, a mountain range is a “fist of broken knuckles” and the island highway “a slash of asphalt” while in the passenger seat the sleepy traveller’s breath “spreads like petals across the glass.”

With a keen eye for details and uncommon similes, Rader negotiates the space between “slip and fall” and captures how “our days have been marked in different ways.” When he writes about those moments his words sear us “like fire in the mouth.” His collection is reflective and often unsettling in its candor.