Edited by the Land and Labour Poetry Collective,
Fernwood Publishing, 2025

It’s been over 30 years since Paperwork, the last of Tom Wayman’s classic trio of work poetry anthologies, and there’s been a dearth of such books until now. That gap in time, note the editors of I’ll Get Right On It, “coincided with the ascendency and dominance of neoliberal governments, markets and ideologies that have promoted individualism and market-based solutions while eroding unions, communities of care and solidarity among working people.” Things haven’t become more secure for workers. And climate change has made things worse. The editors—a collective of six poets that includes Moni Brar, Jenna Butler, Samantha F. Jones and Kelly Shepherd from Alberta—sent out a call for poems “about what it’s like to do your job (paid or unpaid), make a living or just get by in our age of climate change and uncertainty.” The resulting anthology, with some 90 contributors, is varied in approach. In “Bitumen Refining and Its Outcomes: A Short Course,” oil sands worker Ross Belot recalls being called a “hero” when he was employed at a mine and then, in retirement, realizing “we were not heroes, I watched/ California burn.” In “988,” suicide crisis line responder Fiona Conway writes of talking to a 13-year-old girl “so afraid of the way/ her breath warms the world.” And yet there is hope. As Ikeoluwapo B. Baruwa writes in “The Advocate,” his poem about working in a chemistry lab:

“…the storms outside
The floodwaters, the rising heat
Are not just nature’s chaos //
Each hazard I find is a reminder
We build the risks we face
But in the building
There is hope for unbuilding, too.”

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by Marco Melfi
Gaspereau Press
2025/$23.95/96 pp.

Gaspereau Press has long produced beautiful books, their covers gorgeously textured, unspoiled by blurbs, and, within, an array of solidly crafted poems.

Marco Melfi’s Routine Maintenance is no exception. Most of the pieces in this debut are “thing” lyrics, one-page descriptors of screen doors, winter tires, alarm clock radios or balloons, while others are depictions of people as still lives held in the amber eye of attentiveness: a soccer coach, a cobbler, a sound tech, hockey dads and a neighbour who grossly horks like “a lawn mower’s false start… a yolky lime slug” (“The Neighbour’s Loogie”). Thing poems, otherwise known by the German term Dinggedicht (as coined by scholar Kurt Oppert), are a type of verse developed in the 19th century in which objects are not merely depicted but also personified or described in a language that seems innate to that tool, structure or natural entity. Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908) is one early example, and poet Kayla Czaga also utilizes this mode in poems such as “The Hairbrush,” from her 2024 collection Midway.

Melfi has a fantastic ear and that makes all the difference to his at times banal or excessively masculinized materials. I never imagined being interested in “The Appliance Repair Guy’s Insights” until I read the lines “His drill screams like teens on e-scooters./ Screws teeter loose. He unlatches the plastic/ and the dishwasher’s innards unspool.” Nor the thoughts of “The Furnace’s Blow Motor,” but listen to its sonorous complaints: “You ignored the ironing-board-singed scent… how much lint and dander those guys choke on” and, at the end, its funny advice to replace the windows as “They’ve been drafty since Chrétien.” The sensitivity to vowel sounds is particularly apparent, demanding these poems be read aloud. The strongest pieces are those connecting objects and people to Melfi’s history, especially to his Nonno, his grandfather. From the first poem, “My Grandfather Taught Me To Fish,” with its crisp triadic stanzas (“Maybe that afternoon was more than a lesson/ He gave me his rod, lures and bait to keep/ it was our only session”), to later when he finds Nonno’s “Union Manual” (“black lettering with that iconic CN logo”), the bond between thing, place, person, language and form render such poems potent.

Although Melfi’s lyrics can be a tad too cutesy, as when a felled sign is compared to “an injured athlete” or fissured Safeway bags are envisioned as “pickled” into a “funk,” Routine Maintenance is a delectable-for-the-ear examination of what we usually dismiss without the respect it deserves—that potato wedger, or waste collector, or grade school caretaker who magically, for years, “scraped, without scuff, gummed desks.”

Catherine Owen is the author of Moving to Delilah (2024).

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by Lorne Daniel
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2025/$18.99/96 pp.

“I who once thought myself a true/ Alberta boy,” Lorne Daniel writes in the breath-filled piece “What Has Taken Place,” from his multi-faceted collection What Is Broken Binds Us. Daniel, a former Albertan living in BC, returns to family, to the land, to ancestors and to sites of injury—including estrangement from his struggling son—to craft poems that hurt with necessary truths while working towards mending.

Right from one of the early pieces, “Crushed,” the reader knows Daniel has an ear for language, with lines such as “waiting for a break,/ me and this sleek crow, its cape/ tucked and trim.” This knowledge builds trust to follow his passage from the personal injury and recuperation of a bicycle accident in Part One, to Part Two’s sharp awareness of colonial privilege and its damages: “Charlie asked no questions,/ I am sure, about how land came to be ‘free’ ” (“Tack, Harness, Lash”). Throughout the third section, Daniel returns to his ancestral plantation in Magnolia, Texas, articulating in descriptive stanzas the disjunct between historical wounds, both personal and communal, and his current comprehension, marking how the reverberations of past traumas in North America—such as slavery and conquest—continue, with the “tempo and tone/ playing out now” (“Fugue and Spiritual”).

Potent as these pieces are, the 13-part long poem “Episodic Tremor and Slip,” about Daniel’s grown and troubled son, has the deepest impact. This central elegy charts the regularly approaching tremors of the “earthquake” offspring, and how useless one can feel as a parent in the face of such pain. One is always crisis-managing but never resolving. As Daniel lists, “So little to show/ for the emergency cash, the good talk, that last/ fresh start.” And he points to how society often attends to a problem’s externals, rarely looking within: “Sure, we can talk about the drinking./ So much harder to talk about the thirst.” The crushing thirteenth section recounts how, after two years of absence, he sees his son, and despite all, finds himself “thinking/ something about hope.”

The poems following this stunning piece feel less realized at times, or perhaps some lyrics needed cutting and others combining into fewer segments that meld familial death and a bond with nature. But one line rings clear: “People don’t send cards/ mourning the anniversary/ of an estrangement” (“You Don’t Get Here Without”), as Daniel elaborates on the gaps in our capacities to honour, bear witness or truly heal. And yet poets will always make the attempt to cross that crevasse, as he writes in “To Carry an Absence”: “learn to lean/ a little… to feel a certain balance shift.”

Catherine Owen is the author of Moving to Delilah (2024).

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FRONTENAC HOUSE
2025/$22.95–$24.95

Frontenac House’s Poetry Quintet 2025 is a diverse array of collections, each offering up challenging questions about relationships to both self and others.

Carley Mayson’s If I Know Anything About a Knife is a necessarily uneasy read. Amid poems of solace such as the couplet stanzas of “Prayers to the Moments In-Between” that list simple redemptive pleasures—“a long walk in the snow, a dog’s nose”—Mayson’s grief also twists her into a “yellow bird… [that] sharpened its beak on [her] wrists and ankles,” her addictions spinning her into rehab. Her eruptive poems leap between lyrics and a haibun, a pantoum and breath-punctuated prose pieces, as the collection rises to that essential healing wound that poetry can be.

In contrast, if you prefer your poetry to consist of sardonic shrugs and insouciant ditties, pick up David Romanda’s Your Lover Stabbed in the Streets, a collection of flat sketches of mostly head-shaking human behaviour. While a few delve into darker realms, recounting the “pink sawdust” in slaughterhouses, or his father, metaphorized into a tree “that claims kites,” others are just crass toss-offs (though I did appreciate the “old writer” lyrics). If you like the minimalism of Rupi Kaur or the understated drolleries of Stuart Ross, then you may find this assemblage compelling.

There’s Magic Here Too: A Trans Woman’s Guide to Being Monstrous, by Skylar Kay, says it all in the title. Poems such as “How to be one of the Good Ones,” “Monsterology 201: Halloween Party, Felix Street,” and “Dysmorphia Redux” excavate painful sites of trans misunderstandings, along with the beauty and relief of mythical transformations as “liquor/ drips” from a centaur’s beard to his “hairy chest’s/ faded incision scars.” Kay plays with Wallace Stevens in “Thirteen Questions for a Dead Dad,” draws on the sonnet and haibun to speak of the liquefaction of borders, the resistance to those who “hate anyone who falls between,” and also uses structures provided by the 8-ball, footnotes and erasure. I guarantee you’ve never read a poem like “Post-Op Ghost Story” that begins: “My vagina is haunted/ by the ghost of penis past.” This is one of the gifts of poetry, so generously able to gather in all forms of life experience and sing fiercely of them.

D.A. Lockhart’s Leaf Counter, the title referring to the winged guide in the Lenape language, laces words from its Unami dialect through this loquacious collection. The site is Prince Edward County, home to Al Purdy’s A-frame house, and the speaker, in conversation with Purdy, Charles Bukowski, Indigenous histories and the land itself, creates a range of paeans and ripostes. Lockhart’s titles are fantastic, such as “Sisyphus Longs for a Smoke at Canada’s Dinosaur Park and Reptile Zoo” or “Eurithe Purdy Climbs to the Moon on a Light Beam to Chase away a Squirrel’s Nest.” But the poems can feel overelaborated at times, a tad talky. The pieces with taut lines and crisp evocations, such as “Revelations about Lilacs at Roblin Lake” (and a host of others), work most potently, as Lockhart asks us to “reckon with/ how revelations arrive” within elegies that are “outpourings of awakenings.”

But of these five releases, juniper, by kerri huffman, may be the most startling of all. These well-crafted poems pay homage to platonic friendship, its urgencies, awkwardnesses, bonds of addictive behaviour and ruptures of unreturned phone calls and Facebook disses. A chronicle of Jeanne’s 49 days at the titular rehab composes half the text (each piece starting with italicized lists of the speaker’s weight, workouts, drinks, pills), while other lyrics incorporate her son, art galleries and stirring moments where “Love imprints itself bodily.”

Each of the collections in Frontenac House’s Poetry Quintet 2025 serves up a variety of investigations into being truly human in the world.

Catherine Owen is the author of 17 collections of poetry and prose. Her latest is Moving to Delilah (2024).

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by Anna Veprinska
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2025/$18.99/96 pp.

Bonememory, the second collection by Ukrainian-born Calgary-based poet Anna Veprinska, navigates a lattice of Slavic, Jewish and anglophone identity with nuance and wordplay. Articulating a stable if not fixed identity is no easy task, as language itself is “all cheekbones/ and blind spots.”

The collection has two parts: “Bone” and “Memory,” buffered by a brief “Metaphysical Interlude.” Poems such as “Not memory, but retelling” acknowledge the complexity of remembrance: “After/ Chernobyl, there was me… a small, coiled poppy.” Recounting its own origin story, the poem goes on to ask “Who am I if I believe this?/ Who am I if I don’t?”

Russian is both invader and mother tongue. One poem describes a palm reading by Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, who speaks “About the future, in Russian-/ a language shared between us.” The poem’s imperative to survive evokes the fraught connections language makes for us, despite ourselves. “Mama gestures at the television, where day and night news from Ukraine/ whirls without pause—our family is absent from all that.” Leveraging words to make sense of cultural multiplicity, Veprinska notes overlapping sounds in the Ukrainian word for name and Hebrew word for mother: “name and mother come tangled/ in my cultures’ languages: monikers trail bodies/ like second umbilical cords.”

Moving amid languages heightens attention to word meanings, parts and compounds, and a many-eared attention suffuses this collection. Significant strangenesses like common (and thereby unobserved) eponyms are made explicit in translation. We meet Wound, a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant singing at synagogue in her Saturday best. She “smears religion/ on her skin/ like sunblock” and changes her name “to Wanda,/ a Slavic word/ meaning wanderer.” Veprinska’s deft tuning alerts readers to the semantics our worlds are built upon—a lingering influence indicative of powerful work.

Lore, bones, memories, meaning. These gatherings are as chronic as the speaker’s pain, heightening awareness of goings-on “beneath skinsong.” Corporeal metaphors become literal—what we stomach, gut through, gut check. Life and afterlives intertwine. One poem teaches Elie Wiesel’s Night virtually during the pandemic. Another responds to the homogenization of Emily Dickinson’s dashes for publication, highlighting how we punctuate ourselves and others, dead and alive.

Identity wanes and waxes. Away from words and people, in a field with “small suns (misnamed/ dandelions)”, temporary peace is found: “for hours/ I do not wonder/ who I am.”

K.B. Thors is the author of Vulgar Mechanics (Coach House).

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Edited by Jim Ellis and Noreen Humble
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2025/$34.99/176 pp.

Mythologies of Outer Space, edited by Jim Ellis and Noreen Humble, is, as a physical object, a beautiful book, with colourful pages filled with gorgeous art, photography and diagrams. It would not be out of place on a coffee table. But it is so much more than a book for display. From outer space archaeologist Alice Gorman’s fascinating examination of changing perceptions of the moon as a living (or life-supporting) entity or a dead and sterile rock, to Mi’kmaw astronomer Hilding Neilson’s examination of the relationship between astronomy, space exploration and Indigenous rights, to an afterword written by Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk, the book is a manifold engagement with space, in large part as it’s been imagined but also as it’s been experienced first-hand.

The book emerged, Ellis tells us in the introduction, from the 42nd annual community seminar of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. Informally arranged into three sections, it opens with a focus on the moon. After Gorman’s chapter, Humble traces conceptions of the moon back to two ancient Greek texts written by Lucian in the second century C.E.: True Histories and Icaromenippus. She convincingly documents Lucian’s influence in work by figures as diverse as Johannes Kepler, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Following this, Keith Sidwell’s translation of Lucian’s peculiar and amusing “Voyage to the Moon” is worth the read just for the wildly imaginative narrative of lunar gender and procreation.

After the lunar section is a collection of scholarly chapters, thankfully written for a general audience, with widely accessible scholarship devoid of jargon and intrusive citation. Neilson’s thought-provoking chapter stands out here. He convincingly argues that “treaties do not have a height limit,” that light pollution is colonization, and that “any action by Canada, as a nation-state, in outer space must be conducted with and with the consent of Indigenous peoples living on these lands.” Another chapter sees digital humanities scholar Chris Pak sketching a history of narratives of terraforming as a way of understanding different time periods’ views of the future and planetary development. Resonant with Pak’s piece, Stefania Forlini delves into archival work with the U of C’s Bob Gibson Collection of Speculative Fiction. Gibson, whom Forlini identifies as a “lifelong collector of the everyday,” compiled more than 880 anthologies that “exemplify the carefully curated work of a collector with ‘scavenger sensibilities.’ ” This chapter is accompanied by compelling reproductions of rare periodical and book covers of speculative fiction.

The final section is a collection of artistic representations of outer space. Kyle Flemmer’s “Stellar Sequence” is essentially a high-quality poetry chapbook of a series of poems, each titled after a stellar body, the page colour corresponding to the colour of star poetically represented—“Red Dwarfs” appearing on a red page, “Blue Giants” on a blue page, etc. Elyse Longair engages in a conversation with collage artist Naomi Potter, accompanied by gorgeous reproductions of her work. And Nancy Tousley discusses “You Will Remember When You Need To,” David Hoffos’s mixed media installation piece that also includes some unsettling images from his work.

Mythologies of Outer Space is an aesthetically stunning text. It’s also unapologetically eclectic, so is difficult to summarize without doing it an injustice. Taken as a whole, it traces a history of vision and exploration and points to humanity’s future imaginative interactions with space, both inner and outer.

Jay Gamble teaches English at the University of Lethbridge and is the author of Book of Knots (Book*hug Press)

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by M. Jay Smith
IGUANA BOOKS
2024/$18.00/74 pp.

You can find almost any film now and watch it at will. What’s harder than it used to be is drawing a bead on what others have seen. With audiences dispersed in their homes instead of gathered together in art houses, we’ve lost a common point of view. Everyone’s range of reference is a series of unshared memories and in-jokes. So it’s brave of Edmonton poet M. Jay Smith to make her first collection, The Eclipse, one whose starting point is the cinematic language of the late, great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (director, not coincidentally, of the 1962 film L’Eclisse).

A starting point isn’t the same as a POV, of course. What Smith hasn’t done is write a book about Antonioni films. She’s done something a lot more interesting—create an Antonioni film using language rather than visuals.

Take this, from “the red desert”: “today’s dream you dream of/ scarves,/ utopian shapes// perched on/ dirty grass, dimensions/ challenging belief: // cathedrals of pipes & valves/ a glimmering city”

The words here refer back to the breathtaking industrial landscapes of Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso, but the architecture of the lines is all Smith—butting concrete imagery (“perched on/ dirty grass”) up against interpretive language (“dimensions/ challenging belief”). The poem’s form—with its short stanzas of short lines—gives us the combined physical and mental experience we might have in the cinema. An image. Our thought—a footnote to it. Another image—a footnote to the thought. An embarrassment of riches.

An embarrassment of riches is a defining characteristic of the contemporary West as it scoops up everything possible into its frenzy of productivity. Antonioni saw the beauty in the artifacts of industrial production—turning the camera’s focus away from the monuments of power and onto the kinetics of nature, and of capital put to transformative use. Smith does the same, as in “the spume of leisure”. Always, she writes:

“something

resembles something else

polarized sentiment is

this, spume”

Smith sees the froth on the waves and makes of it what both nature and capitalism are always making—“something else.” The language here is a demonstration of the poem’s meaning—the repetition of sibilants and plosives, the short vowels leading to a single long vowel. We see resemblance shifting into difference and back into resemblance: a world without end and made of a world that’s always ending.

Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views.

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On Oil
by Don Gillmor
Biblioasis, 2025

“Alberta is this crucible for all the problems facing society in the next century,” says a University of Calgary researcher in journalist Don Gillmor’s new book. “And some of those problems are in conflict with one another.” That researcher works to reduce the carbon footprint of the oil sands—no easy task, given that every year Alberta produces ever more oil to heat homes, power cars and make everything from plastics to fertilizers to pharmaceuticals. And yet, as a fuel for climate change, oil is also a threat to social and ecological stability. Collectively we have to wean ourselves off it. Gillmor doesn’t tell us how to do that. But in a short, incisive, at times rollicking book, he takes us from the drilling floor (he was a roughneck in the 1970s) to the capitulation of our government to industry under premiers Klein and Smith (most notably) to a glimpse of “the road to a viable future.”

My Works, Ye Mighty
by Christian Bök
Athabasca University Press, 2025

“Conceptualism lets us zoom into the future of poetry,” writes Christian Bök near the end of this slim yet mind-bending book, “at the puny scale of an atom or the vast scale of the void.” Known for his bestselling experimental poetry book Eunoia, or perhaps for his Xenotext project in which he attempted to encipher a poem into the DNA of a bacterium, Bök is here referencing, and is inspired by, the movie Powers of Ten, in which the scale of perspective zooms in from the edge of the observable universe down into an atom. Bök applies this to language, zooming out from mark to phrase to book to archives, exploring the idea of a “minimal element in writing,” a “unit” and “scale at which any literary creation can occur.”

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Curated by Arin Fay
Edited by Nic Wilson
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2025/$32.95/160 pp.

Many years have passed since I first saw an exhibition of still-life paintings by the Governor General’s Award-winning Métis artist David Garneau. But the memory of that small pop-up show still casts a spell over me. His images of rocks suspended on strings felt like Zen koans: puzzles without answers, only mysteries to ponder.

Now, with the publication of Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau—in which 17 diverse writers, critics and curators respond to Garneau’s recent series of still-life paintings—I finally have some answers, riddled, of course, with an ever-growing number of questions.

The first clue to understanding Garneau’s enigmatic artworks—composed of textless books, rocks and bones often precariously balanced and bound with clamps or strings—is the title. Both the book and Garneau’s still-life series echo Justice Murray Sinclair’s assertion that residential schools were among the darkest chapters in Canadian history.

As the book unfolds, a kaleidoscope of meanings begins to emerge. For Tahltan Nation artist and curator Peter Morin, Garneau’s stones are living beings—literally—like “painted breath.” Morin traces this response to his youth, sitting in a sweat lodge, watching the stones pulse with a red glow. “At the current age of 46, I now know that those rocks were actually painted by too many years of knowing the Universe’s secrets,” he writes in the chapter “Stone and Rock: I Have Failed You.”

Tarene Thomas, a writer from Enoch Cree Nation and the Northwest Coast, was inspired by the nameless books that recur throughout Garneau’s paintings. Her poem “Smudge Before Reading” questions academia and poses an unsolvable question: “What does it mean to study oneself in the white man’s house?” She concludes with a powerful affirmation: “And I know we will rise to fight / But for now, we’ll smudge before we read.”

The most searing essay is by Larissa Lai, the Richard Charles Lee chair of Chinese Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto. In “Allies (After Hsieh and Montano)” she confronts those, including myself, who claim allyship from positions of power. “Their goodness shouts louder than your pain,” she writes. Garneau mirrors those sentiments with wordless irony. His painting Ally Tear Reliquary depicts a box of tissues pompously displayed beneath a glass museum case.

“The life of the eye is anything but still,” writes Fred Wah, in “Spine,” another poem in the book. Indeed. Each of the contributions in this anthology unveil ever-deeper aspects of Garneau’s still-lifes—revealing them as not just deep and insightful works but among the masterpieces of Canadian art.

Agnieszka Matejko is an artist and writer in Edmonton.

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by David Martin
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2024/$18.99/136 pp.

Calgary poet David Martin’s third book, Limited Verse, is a brilliant feat of imagination, mashing together poetry, dystopian sci-fi and literary theory. But most of all it is a profound and moving investigation of language: about how language hems in or liberates our thoughts, about its power to preserve memory and forge human connection despite its limits, and about its inherent instability through time.

The book takes the form of an annotated manuscript recovered after the liberation of New Earth, a fictional penal colony of labourers whose memories were wiped and whose language was “Harmonized”—that is, replaced with New English, a rudimentary lexicon of 850 words. (New English is modelled on Basic English, invented in 1925 by the real linguist C.K. Ogden as a means of cross-cultural communication.) On the brink of being shipped out to New Earth and desperate to build a bridge between past and future selves, the manuscript’s anonymous author has translated beloved poems into New English in a notebook to be smuggled into the colony, interspersing the poems with journal entries that ruminate on the looming transformation.

The opening pages of the journal express a searching curiosity rather than pure dread: “Yes, I have fear, but maybe when I am awake with only 850 words I will experience a strangeness that will make the land feel new. I will have less to grip onto with my mind and more to see with feeling.” What ensues is an invitation to the reader to consider the effects of such a radical simplification of language—what is lost, what is gained, what eludes the grip of the mind and what is preserved in the way of feeling.

Working my way through the book, I found myself fantasizing about being an English instructor and designing a course around Limited Verse—I can’t imagine a better teaching tool for conveying poetry as the act of fumbling toward vivid precision within the limits of language and the constraints imposed by poetic form. The original poems upon which the translations are based are all in the public domain and can easily be found on the internet, occasionally with some creative searching. I read each New English poem side by side with its original—first the translation for a first impression, then the original, then back to the translation for a close comparison.

Many of the poems deal with themes of loss, transformation and renewal, as does “Fire-Flowers” by E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake. The ending stanza of the original is:

And only to the heart that knows of grief
Of desolating fire, of human pain
There comes some purifying sweet belief
Some fellow-feeling beautiful, if brief
And life revives, and blossoms once again.

In Martin’s hands—without the pivotal word “grief”— the stanza becomes:

And only to the heart that knows death’s song
Of wasting fire, and of the human pain,
There comes something so clear, so sweet and strong,
Some equal-feeling beautiful, not long.
And time restarts, and opens now again.

The translated poems at times sing and at times strain, but both their beauty and their awkwardness are illuminating and spark reflection: How does a limited verbal palette foreclose opportunities for playing with sound as well as meaning Does a reduced vocabulary for the natural world constitute a tragic form of collective memory loss, as explored by Robert Macfarlane in his book of poems The Lost Words, devoted to items (e.g., “fern”, “heron”, “willow”) dropped from the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary Or does the need to express familiar referents with new raw materials allow us to see a thing afresh, as when Martin translates “falcon” as “knifebird” When does the austerity of New English sever our link to the past and when does it lift an already deadened and inaccessible form of language into the present, pulsing with new vitality?

Endnotes, provided by fictional scholars from far in the post-New Earth future, offer analysis and commentary on the recovered notebook. Leveraging an ample lexicon that permits nuance and abstraction, these notes delve into theories of literary translation, George Orwell’s views on language, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis about the relationship between language and thought, the fetishization of simplicity by high modernist writers such as Eliot, Joyce and Pound (who were advocates for the spread of Ogden’s Basic English), and the creative power of constraints on language (“the smaller the room in prison, the greater the mind’s purpose and power of expansion,” writes Martin’s protagonist). An integral part of the text, the notes guide the reader into a deeper experience of the New English poems and journal entries.

The mind-wipe and Harmonization process awaited by the protagonist serves to anchor one of the book’s central preoccupations: that language is never fixed in time, that it is always subject to the forces of change, loss and reinvention. It is easy to foreground the losses—in our own historical moment, declining reading habits and the levelling effects of ChatGPT may well be simplifying English, and within our lifetimes many of us will feel the mind-wiping effects that come with dementia or aphasia. But a deeply humane and hopeful vision permeates Limited Verse, reminding us that a creative spirit can withstand what may seem a devastating shrinkage of language. A lexicon of 850 words is enough to grapple with the most profound aspects of human experience: love, religion, trouble, death. Clever and erudite as he is, Martin’s true genius lies in showing, through his rejuvenated—if at times lurching—poems and through the soulful journal entries of the protagonist, that “art is ever the sign of the attempt to connect” and that “the Old English will be gone, but thought is able to stretch beyond the limit of language and touch the deepest part of us.”

Julie Sedivy is the author of Linguaphile (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Memory Speaks (Harvard University Press).

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