All You Expect of the Road

Olga Costopoulos-Almon teaches English at the University of Alberta.

Sue Nevill’s book is built on a submerged structure of journeys,
through life and landscapes. Her work manages to be personal but not
excessively confessional, and she reveals a genuine empathy with other
people, an empathy which enables her to create interesting characters.
One of her most startling poems deals with the ultimate political
correctness perplexity: seeing a blind man beating his dog in front of a
liquor store. Her images are drawn from landscape (especially the
mountains of British Columbia) and science (including medicine and
natural history). The one mannerism overworked in this collection is the
second person as a disguised form of the first person. This is
Nevill’s first book in a decade, and it has obviously been pondered
and crafted.