Slant Room is a marvellous debut by Yukon poet Michael Eden Reynolds. These are poems of verbal adventurousness, subtlety, formal rigour and clarity — but their craft in no way diminishes their full-heartedness.

Slant Room marks the book-length emergence of a poet whose work, already startlingly assured, is gaining national recognition. The poetry of Michael Eden Reynolds transforms both the Yukon’s terrain and such everyday objects as a refrigerator through the use of arresting imagery and spare, dense language, finding a musical equivalence that is rare in contemporary Canadian poetry. ‘... I knock/ a cup of sugar cubes, it spits across/ the tabletop: metric archipelago.’ The book’s four sections include the spacious landscapes of ‘Spare Room’, an elegiac dream-suite, ‘Migrations’, and the strange mindscapes from the title section. The finale, ‘Fugue’, shows the poet expanding his repertoire in a suite of interpenetrating sonnets that wormhole from the past through a catastrophic future. Reynolds’ voice, reminiscent by turns of the imagery of John Thompson and the musicality of W. S. Graham, is nonetheless distinctive, and finally original. This book is: ‘... a room that makes you:/ the way that rock was split, awed,/ mouth filled with rare plants and meltwater.’

Table of contents

Invocation

Spare Room
Spring Night in Caledon
Atlantic Rain
Ouimet Canyon
Estranged
Upper Laberge
White River Ashfall
Glimpse
Nostalgia
Loon Loon Loon
Translations of Willow
Again
Chorus

Migrations

Slant Room
Slow Boat
Ho Fa Hotel: On the malady of travel
The Safety Pin
Aleph-nought
The Microchip
There are many rooms
Castor Gulo (poem of a beaver becoming a wolverine)
Upon the Conversion of Stephen Harper
Early Spring, Canoe Lake (1917)
Self Portrait as a One-Eyed Rat (F.H. Varley, Lynn Valley, 1934)
Past the fence with the ghost of the choked dog
Window Polishing
Left Turn
Fetascope
Tuesday Myth
Chickenpox Daughter
Soundtrack to the Moment of Your Birth

Fugue

Review text

‘Something profoundly Canadian, Slant Room is a collection of poetry from Michael Eden Reynolds, a man born and raised and in love with his home country of Canada. His poetry reflects on the many aspects of his country from the urban life that isn’t all that different from America’s, to a rural great north that is like nowhere else in the world. Slant Room is a top pick for any world poetry collection. ‘‘Tuesday Myth’’: A lesser god slips through a baffle in the air/and doesn’t go back, lives out a mortal life/moment to moment, opens up a franchise shop,/wakes, works and sleeps, makes a ceremony out of every needless meal.’

—James Cox, Midwest Book Review

Review quote

‘When you pick up Michael Eden Reynolds’ first collection of poetry, Slant Room, it is as if he is handing you a pair of binoculars. As soon as you have finished focusing on the constellations far above, he gets you to flip the binoculars around so you are looking down the wrong end. Binoculars, of course, work both ways. One way, they make us feel as if we can reach out and touch the roof of our galaxy. The other way, they act as a magnifying glass, enabling us to look at what we think we already know in sometimes uneasy detail. Reynolds plays with our perspective right from the start of his collection in ‘‘Spring Night in Caledon’’, where we begin with our attention focused on a vegetable (‘‘Spring comes up like an onion’’) and end with that vast galaxy view (‘‘I no longer know how I saw the world yesterday.’’). In between, he sticks our noses in dung and rotting garbage and makes our eyes water along with his own.’

—Joanna Lilley, The Northern Review

Description for reader

‘Zach Wells, that fellow of strong opinions, first brought Michael Eden Reynolds to my attention. More than simply a freshness of voice, I read in Slant Room a longing: ‘What you see keeps receding, your breath/ in the morning air as you shift: one side, the other’, and a searching: ‘This is someone else’s dream you’re in,/ though the rustworn tune’s familiar as he carries your old bones through town’, and a celebration: ‘sun, our two-fisted heart,/ pulls open the cloud’. Fashion cycles, as we know, but if that seer of Modernism, Ezra Pound, said one true thing, that ‘Only emotion endures’, then I welcome you to the opportunity to come away from what Michael Reynolds has given us, with something enduring.’

—Wayne Clifford, author of Man in a Window (1965)

Flap copy

Reynolds’ poems have won the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and the John Haines Award for Poetry. He was also a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in 2005, the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award in 2006, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Contest in 2007. His work has been anthologized in The Best of Canadian Poetry in English 2008, edited by Molly Peacock and Stephanie Bolster (Tightrope Books).

Excerpt from book

Glimpse

Sight is a bird
atop the spine.

Sleep is the twittering
of the closed eye.

There comes a river of fish
caught in dream’s light.

The bird spreads its wings.

Let it be a kingfisher,
to carry this body of dream into memory.

Let it be a tide of swifts in the gathering dusk
to dive like stars into that black cave.

Unpublished endorsement

‘Here is a poet whose eye and ear and heart are open to the pulsations of life on the planet and beyond. He realizes that the universe is larger than any poet, and humbly allows that universe to regain centre stage.... It takes me right to the heart of what finally matters, what will last: “Newborn and oldest thing, open the hollow syllable of your name to the wind”. In its openness and timelessness, the poem honours the example set by John Haines.’

—Erling Friis-Baastad (citation from the John Haines award)