Equinox, Solstice: Randy Lundy's Poetry

Yesterday, the first day of spring. Today, large flakes of snow...

My copy of 2016's Best Canadian Poems falls open to this poem, Randy Lundy's "An Ecology of Being and Non-Being." It's the poem that introduced me to his work, and I go back to it for the way it keeps returning me to the physical world, and the way it clarifies the world that is from the world that is like. The way it restores me to a habitat.

I also go back repeatedly to Lundy's recent collection, Field Notes for the Self (UofRegina/Oksana), for many of the same reasons. With each re-reading, the poems keep renewing: me, themselves.

I wrote a short review of it for Arc Poetry: "Everything, This Near" (you can read it here). The title of the review comes from the poem "Meditation at the Approach of Solstice." After a long look at the world, from the vantage points of field and city, present and past, the poem pulls us into a burning wick of moment, in which "you feel the breath of everything. Everything, this near."

"How is it that you and I have met here on this page," we are asked, in "Lines with No Opinion Regarding Indigenous Mythical Realism." I don't know, but I'm glad.