“Susan Glickman’s latest book of poetry, Cathedral/Grove, is forested with a wide variety of poems, or rather, communities of poems, both in style and subject matter. Pockets of prose-poems shoulder up near sunny slopes of free verse; poems that find their roots in daily life–deadheading flowers or walking the dog–stand tall next to poems of troubled histories: the pogroms in Russia or the conflagration of the Notre-Dame de Paris (the latter is described in the poem that forms the centrepiece of the book and shares its title).
Throughout the volume, Glickman (What We Carry) returns to the forest, from noting the “shadow” a tree casts after a snowfall—“as though it were a memory of that tree’s / full-foliaged summer shadow, / the trees themselves stretching generous branches / to the sky, the snow caught up there, / unfallen”—to a startling image in a poem that explores the legend and forest of Robin Hood, where the deer move in “the greenwood, their antlers / another kind of forest, moving.”
As with any journey into the forest, we are confronted with both the familiar and surprises. “I’ve never noticed that before!” is something we can find ourselves saying no matter how many times we’ve entered the same woods.”
https://thebcreview.ca/2024/09/05/2283-rempel-glickman/embed/#?secret=crqpPzT7LQ#?secret=RyFPUwygzq
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