That's what she said

Robert Bringhurst's Selected Poems is lyrical and spartan, authoritative without being didactic. In a fresh and dewy critique in the Guardian, Kate Kellaway likens reading Bringhurst's poems to "breathing pure air:"

There are several beautiful, lightly wrought but profound meditations of this sort: a marvellous poem "The Reader", about a woman reading (the transition between the world of her book and the external world to which she returns perfectly understood); and an entranced incantation – "The Heart Is Oil" – which begs to be read aloud and allowed to flow. Bringhurst writes in perfect cadences and with biblical authority. Yet his diction tends to be simple, his preference plainsong.

Here's a excerpt from "These Poems, She Said," a "funny, fond and devastating," poem that Kellaway suggests can be read as "Bringhurst's furtive manifesto, an analysis of what matters in his poetry:"

These poems, these poems,

these poems, she said, are poems

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man

who would leave his wife and child because

they made noise in his study. These are the poems

of a man who would murder his mother to claim

the inheritance. These are the poems of a man

like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not

comprehend but which nevertheless

offended me. These are the poems of a man

who would rather sleep with himself than with women,

she said....