Survival Gear

Chris Knight is a copy editor at Canadian Press.

In 59 prose poems, Moir lets us follow her from her home in British
Columbia to her relatives in Nova Scotia—and, after lessons and tears,
home again.

These poems are both intriguing and enchanting—the first because Moir
manages to construct a portrait of Canada without resorting to the
interior; her vivid descriptions of the coasts tie the work together,
“a giant piece of rope, stretching from the docks of our oceans, and
... we are together, stronger than two hands entwined,” she writes in
“Splicing.” It is as if she had drawn a broad outline for us to fill
in and make sense of. The enchantment comes from the way the poems
connect like a string of family photos, the characters the same but each
page adding detail and depth, drawing the reader inside.

Images of Nova Scotian Rappie pie, scars, snow, and survival gear bind
this work together but without becoming stale in the process. Moir has
the knack of bringing the same image back to the reader from a new
direction so that we see it as something very different in meaning from
the first time.