Another poem, “Spring,” is never hackneyed, despite its familiar theme: it abounds with precise observations of Newfoundland weather, like the “tendrilly fog.” “Aids Ward,” Wingate’s poem about her father’s death from AIDS, is structured on the old pattern of “This Is the House That Jack Built.” As her couplets proceed, the appalling medical details unfold with the cumulative power given by the structure. The poems that do not work in this otherwise excellent book are based on the sad letters that conscientious objectors sent to her father, a War Resister’s League counsellor, during the Vietnam War. The poet lets the materials speak too much for themselves, and they aren’t powerful enough to be successful. Not everything that is found is found poetry.

Roland Pemberton is aiming not at perfection but at capturing the moment, giving us news of the street and the hubbub of urban life. He was Edmonton’s very successful poet laureate from 2009–2011. Pemberton’s appointment was unusual: he is a rapper who performs under the name “Cadence Weapon.” He now lives in Montreal. Magnetic Days captures the bustle of streets – such as the corner of St-Zotique and St-Laurent – with stanzas that flow like rap lyrics, which is what they essentially are. One exception in form is the title work, an elaborate prose poem about a rare day when everything goes right and others can feel the magnetism emanating from the lucky person, though in the conclusion he says that such a day should be treated carefully, “like a hot pitcher in the bottom of the eighth.” The poem summons up Frank O’Hara or Apollinaire in its droll urbanity. There are original metaphors in the collection, like “the iron wedding of tooth and nail,” but in his poetry Pemberton is a talented hobbyist rather than a professional.

The perfection that José Acquelin aspires to is a mystical union with the absolute, that which is everywhere at once – or, in his own metaphor, a spherical die. Rather than come to rest, it will roll endlessly. His diction is full of words like “soul,” “infinite,” “breath,” and “light.” He likes to create paradoxes and some lines take the form of aphorisms: “the shadow is the invention of a poet / who’s afraid of himself,” or “eternity is time / that has lost its memory.” Acquelin can be more precise, as in the exquisite lines, “a breeze plays the accordion / over the water’s skin.” He shows real wit in using “The Omar Khayyám Hotel” and “The Rumi Tavern” as settings, and, like those great Persian mystics, he uses alcohol as a metaphor for visionary experience, though Acquelin’s favourite beverage in the poems is coffee. One way that he pursues the absolute is through love, and he includes a section of delightful love poems. Acquelin’s style employs the easy-rolling parallelism of the surrealists (often starting lines with “I” followed by a verb), and he likes surreal metaphors in the manner of André Breton: “the present is a fox of light bulbs / the present is a wine skin filled with beyond.” Yeats would say that there isn’t enough difficulty in these poems to force the plough very deep, but the Infinite is a hard soil to break.

Dorothy Livesay suggested in 1971 that Canadian poetry had created a new genre, “the documentary poem.” The Riel Rebellion has generated many documentary poems, including some important book-length works by Don Gutteridge, Kim Morrissey, and Gregory Scofield. Dilys Leman is a great-great-granddaughter of Augustus Jukes, the chief surgeon for the North-West Mounted Police at the time of the rebellion. In The Winter Count, she makes excellent use of family history in dealing with the rebellion and its aftermath for the Plains Natives and Métis who were under the surgeon’s care. Jukes was also a member of a secret commission set up to inform Prime Minister John A. Macdonald about Riel’s sanity (under the premise that the Government shouldn’t hang a man who is insane). He decided that Riel was sane, but had second thoughts and wrote urgently to Macdonald asking that Riel’s diaries be examined for signs of insanity. The plea was ignored. Leman presents the conflict through the viewpoints of many historical figures, some famous, some ordinary. She includes historical documents that work as found poems – because she found poetry in them. She moves with dexterity between quoted documents and her own poems. The original poems are dramatic when they need to be dramatic, descriptive or lyrical when required. Even readers thoroughly familiar with the history of the rebellion will learn a great deal here.  Leman shows that the documentary poem is still a healthy genre. It has its own perfections. mRb