Anthem

Olga Costopoulos teaches English at the University of Alberta.

Helen Humphreys’s fourth collection contains a rich distillate of her
previous three collections. The voice is now completely sure of itself,
unself-conscious, and entirely competent for its calling, which seems to
be to remove that membrane between the conscious and the subconscious of
her readers. The poems explore the subtext of daily life, from ephemeral
to the concrete. Humphreys sees, as one might put it, “deep down
things.” The tone varies from the almost flat-footed, matter-of-fact
assertion to the pure flight of verbal fancy. For example, in part 4 of
“Chinchilla,” there is such simple diction, such a nuanced weight of
story: “The man was crying and no man had cried in our house before. /
The woman was running and grown-ups never ran.” In some of the later
poems in the book, there is a more conscious informing of the poems
within the tradition—if the words may be used—of women’s writing.
Brick Books has maintained its usual high standard of production, and
the whole is a very artistic package.