Poems Selected and New

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post.

This collection provides a great way to get to know the poetry of
Heather Spears. The 56 poems span the period from the late 1950s to the
present, and include selections from her Governor General’s
Award-winning The Word for Sand (1988).

Spears is a visual artist as well as a literary one—she has published
three books of drawings and nine of poetry—and this crossover
influences her written work’s subject matter as well as its style.
There is a heart-rending work called “The woman who drew dead
babies,” and another written from the viewpoint of a sketch artist in
a courtroom.

In fact, many of these poems start from a familiar, even mundane,
place—a fountain at West Edmonton Mall, a hospital room, an
archeological dig—then gradually expand to take in larger truths,
while never losing touch with the simple, concrete imagery with which
they began. A 1996 poem, “Biking with skulls through Copenhagen,” is
about someone transporting archeological relics. It ends: “my mind /
retells them even now: 2 / on my back (infant, child) / 3 in a row on
the rack / (woman, woman, man) / that makes 5 — / and then I remember
/ it's 6 actually, / and as valuable.”