Said the River

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

This collection offers so many possibilities; its failure is, therefore,
entirely frustrating. Said the River is a collection of short lyric
poems that are interconnected to form a narrative linking the lives two
modern women, Margaret and Susan, with that of 19th-century poet
Isabella Valancy Crawford. Within the fiction so developed, there is
raised the idea of a series of poems that Crawford wrote but never
published because they were too frank for Victorian sensibilities.
Unfortunately, this excellent idea is not fully developed. Indeed, lack
of development is the book’s major flaw. Not only is content
underdeveloped, but so is form. Too many of the pieces aren’t really
poems, but merely excessively chatty prose that has been reformatted
into short lines.