The Green Word: Selected Poems

Julie Rak is a Ph.D. candidate in English at McMaster University.

The poems in this long-overdue collection, by one of Canada’s most
exciting poets, were selected from almost 20 years of work.

Mouré’s poetry can be described as fractured moments, interlaced
with a haunting desire for narrative, in the body, in language. The
strength of The Green Word lies in that tracing of desire for
connections and relations played against the stutter of language in the
full range of Mouré’s work—a counterpoint that emerges in almost
all of the poems. Whether Mouré traces political injustice in Madrid,
images of her family, or the pain and pleasure of loving women, her
images remain sharp, pushing up against each other with a kind of
urgency. The effect is often chilling, such as in “Seebe,” where a
Native boy is hit by the train on which she works—a poem that cannot
ever trace his version of the event.

While Mouré has included many fine poems from books before Furious
(her best-known work), the unique structure of Furious is sacrificed,
cutting many poems adrift from their footnoted prose meditations,
leaving in some cases only the footnote numbers. The effect is
frustrating, particularly since the selected prose sections remaining
are of such high quality. The selections from WSW and photon scanner
(blue spruceé), left more intact, are far more successful in this
regard.

But such drawbacks are minor. As a whole, the collection represents a
remarkable encounter with language, memory, and desire, and it was well
worth the wait.