Redirection: The Prime Sonnets and Other Poems

From its quirky sonnets on each of Canada’s Prime Ministers to its ruminations on the history and landscape that have helped mould this country, Way’s redirection is solidly a Canadian book. The poems are a tour-de-force that shifts in genre, tone, style and theme. Modernist interests are fused with postmodern sensibilities-anything goes as the poems slide from topic to topic, form to form. A charming ode of sorts on Al Purdy gives way to a sustained ode on the death of the author’s great uncle in World War I, a satire about the odd compulsion of neighbours to decorate their driveways sits next to a comic haiku eulogy about an exotic pet owner who loved baby tigers, an elegy on his mother’s death by cancer is followed by an ironic lyric recounting a child’s doomed visit to see Queen Elizabeth-the language of Way’s work is always precise and unswerving-agile, exact, arcane, blunt. This is a poetry in which imagination, translated into language as effectively as words can manage, offers us a new, often redirected view of the world as Way sees it-sometimes funny, sometimes brutal, but always honest, genuine. And always with that ineffable sense that this is a Canadian seeing himself and Canada inside and out, and the world beyond. From its innovative sonnet sequence on Canada’s Prime Ministers to myriad ruminations on matters local and intimate, national and universal, Way’s redirection is a Canadian book of poetry that seeks, unceasingly, to lay bare the Canadian psyche and that of the world beyond.