Raucous

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia. He is the
co-editor of It’s Still Winter, an online journal of contemporary
Canadian poetry and poetics, and Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

W.H. New is the author of more than 30 books. Raucous is his second book
of poems. As in his first book of poems, Science Lessons (1996), New
intermixes the vocabulary of science with the vocabulary of the ordinary
person. In Raucous he also adds the vocabulary of nursery rhyme. These
vocabularies exemplify the complex roles we live, exploring the
boundaries between the ephemeral (the short sprint from the cradle to
the grave) and seemingly permanent (geologic time).

Like Science Lessons, Raucous is a dense, difficult read. It mimes too
much the deliberate obscurity of modernist poetry long after its day has
passed.