East and west

East and West, Laura Ritland's astonishing debut, is a book of visions. These are roving poems drawn to defamiliarizing points of view, and are exquisitely attentive to the way the world exceeds our senses ("Cloud deduced cloud / after cloud and cloud.") Beckoningly tender, lucid and intelligent, elegaic without being maudlin, East and West explores the thresholds--or "middle ground"--of childhood and family, diaspora and migration, and how new cultural ideas can disrupt traditional perspectives. "My bedroom window an escape hatch / to endless sights of coastal stars." Ritland takes the measure of herself"I'm an integer of my own society"--in one of the most distinctive and beautifully turned styles in Canadian poetry.