Radio weather

Radio Weather confronts the changeableness of life--how existence can switch gears with the speed of announced-for snow that turns abruptly to rain. Shoshanna Wingate's first book runs the gauntlet of her various roles--mother, wife, daughter--in taut, unsentimental, immaculately constructed poems that explore the tension between personal imperatives and fickle outside forces. Marked by a vision broad enough take in both a pigeon fancier neighbour and a murderer on death row, Wingate tracks the moments that--midstep, midway, midlife--alter us from who we might have been to who we are now. "The days depart in minor steps," she writes, "then slip away for costume change." Radio Weather is a memorable debut by a poet of exceptional promise.