Seven into Even.

Sheila Martindale is poetry editor of Canadian Author and Bookman and
author of No Greater Love, her sixth collection of poetry.

There is a wide variety of material in this collection, yet it somehow all seems to hold together. The author spent time as a poet-in-residence in Brisbane, Australia, and there are some excellent descriptive poems of the geography of that country.

“Fortitude Valley” stands out in this section. Turner makes her home in Vancouver, and many of the bays in the area are highlighted most effectively. There are poems for the days of the week—especially striking is this from “Monday”: “jimi hendrix blares beautifully like he always does he always did guitar rift like playing the strings of your veins.” There are poems about the seven deadly sins, and an interesting reworking of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which is quite clever but not particularly poetic.

Those who enjoy prose poems will find much of interest here; those who don’t could have difficulty with some of the run-on paragraphs—a kind of stream of consciousness thing without benefit of pause or punctuation. One great “sentence” from one of these is: “your Flintstone feet paddle the pavement furiously but you still can’t get away” (from “Taking Odds”).

The last section, “The History of Sexuality,” is somewhat of an anticlimax, and might have been better placed somewhere in the middle. This book will appeal to mature people serious about reading poetry.