Four new collections to celebrate the beginning of National Poetry Month

Arborophobia

By Nancy Holmes

University of Alberta Press, 104 pages, $19.95

There’s celebration, lament and a twinkle of humour in Nancy Holmes’s sixth collection, “a spiritual reckoning” on themes ranging from environmental degradation (“let’s-build-a-subdivision meadow,” she writes of urban development) to the heartrending ravages of age (a dementia patient’s eyes are “like pits /of forgotten summer thoughts”). One sequence draws on the theological writings of the 14th-century religious mystic Julian of Norwich, whose words serve as compass points orienting the flow of her reflections on motherhood, mortality and faith. Nature is also a muse for Holmes, who lives in the Okanagan Valley, and it inspires some of her most striking figurative language. The book opens with a joyful lyric that savours the names and sensual characteristics of “The Tribes of Grass.” Elsewhere, poems advance in a cascade of metaphors: an anemone’s flower is “A small wheel with delicate spokes./The bruise of love where the wheel runs over you./A button on the kid glove of earth.”

Each One a Furnace

By Tolu Oloruntoba

McClelland & Stewart, 88 pages, $19.95

Tolu Oloruntoba’s follow-up to “The Junta of Happenstance,” which won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2021, could not be more timely. In these profound, multi-layered poems, various species of finch, which migrate in large flocks, become potent metaphors for the mass movement of people in global society. Through chronicling the traits and behaviour of birds, as well as the forces that make survival difficult, he explores themes such as home, community and the need to move to stay safe. But what if home is a cauldron of fraught memories rather than a place of comfort? Oloruntoba, who grew up in Nigeria and now lives in Vancouver, struggles to come to terms with a troubled family history in some of the most affecting poems. He expresses the trauma passed between generations as “how words mix/with chemical anguish into the homemade bombs/people put in their children.” These are poems of deep thought, passionate engagement and often searing images.

How Beautiful People Are

By Ayaz Pirani

Gordon Hill Press, 100 pages, $20

“Not stitched to this place or any place,” Ayaz Pirani writes in this collection of spare, evocative musings on belonging, the meaning of home and the pull of the past. (Pirani was born in Tanzania, grew up in Canada and now lives in California.) Even the style of his work is restless, with lines that unspool in a skein of disparate observations, as in “How many leaves in the forest?/How many men’s suits in the city?” Their power is rooted in resonant images: “I went to the house where you were born,” he writes, “and it was filled with birdsong.” Elsewhere, he describes a grandmother who “had the face of a rock hopes dash on.” Throughout, whether whimsical (“I’d like a serving of children’s joy/with a night of dog’s sleep”) or sardonic (“At the party I’d like to be a person of interest/but will end up a person of color”), these pensive poems sparkle with observed life.

Grappling Hook

By Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang

Palimpsest Press, 80 pages, $19.95

The poems in Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang’s third collection are centred on family life but with an outlook on the wider world, where “#MeToo is trending” and a “wellness check” by police involves the use of force. Many of the poems express the tenderness and worry of a mother, watching her teenage daughter grow up (“I have raised a girl — I know how to braid hair and slip fear into/her pocket like a stone”) and wanting her young son to see that men can show sensitivity as well as toughness. Tsiang grapples with the complexities of relationships, identity and society with clarity and frankness (“I forget sometimes, that you can be alone in a marriage/and still in love,” she writes). But the Kingston-based poet also flashes a more buoyant, fanciful side to her imagination: “I just want to be a good day/To button the clouds on tight/ and pull the sunrise out with a flourish like a handkerchief.”