Purity of Absence

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post in Toronto.

Dave Margoshes takes the title of his collection from a poetic line by
George Amabile, and he similarly attributes many of the 88 poems in this
book to snippets of newspaper stories. It’s a useful reference, for it
allows the reader to see the ordinary before he leaps into the
extraordinary, and to know where he’s coming from. Thus a newspaper
item about Lewis Carroll writing standing up leads to the observation
that it is “the posture / not only of poets but of poetry / itself.”

Many of these works touch on love, and play with the metaphors of love,
as in the poem “Taking Heart,” which ends “I do take heart / and
you take mine.” Or “The Marriage Bed,” in which “we are / ghosts
of ourselves, haunting / our present selves who cannot sleep.” Though
not a collection of love poems per se, these works turn again and again
back to human relationships; they are ultimately about us all.