Description
Slant Room is a marvellous debut by Yukon poet Michael Eden Reynolds. These are poems of verbal adventurousness, subtlety, formal rigour and clarity -- but their craft in no way diminishes their full-heartedness.
About the author
Michael Eden Reynolds was born in Ottawa in 1973, but spent most of his childhood in Caledon, Ontario. He attended the University of Guelph before taking a summer job as a breakfast cook in Dawson City, Yukon, in 1995. He travelled in Asia from 1999 to 2000. Since completing a social work degree at Yukon College in 2003, he's worked as a supported-independent-living worker for adults with disabilities. Michael lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, with his wife Jenny and their two children.
Excerpt: Slant Room (by (author) Michael Eden Reynolds)
Glimpse
Sight is a bird
atop the spine.
Sleep is the twittering
of the closed eye.
There comes a river of fish
caught in dream's light.
The bird spreads its wings.
Let it be a kingfisher,
to carry this body of dream into memory.
Let it be a tide of swifts in the gathering dusk
to dive like stars into that black cave.
Editorial Reviews
'Something profoundly Canadian, Slant Room is a collection of poetry from Michael Eden Reynolds, a man born and raised and in love with his home country of Canada. His poetry reflects on the many aspects of his country from the urban life that isn't all that different from America's, to a rural great north that is like nowhere else in the world. Slant Room is a top pick for any world poetry collection. ''Tuesday Myth'': A lesser god slips through a baffle in the air/and doesn't go back, lives out a mortal life/moment to moment, opens up a franchise shop,/wakes, works and sleeps, makes a ceremony out of every needless meal.'
Midwest Book Review
'When you pick up Michael Eden Reynolds' first collection of poetry, Slant Room, it is as if he is handing you a pair of binoculars. As soon as you have finished focusing on the constellations far above, he gets you to flip the binoculars around so you are looking down the wrong end. Binoculars, of course, work both ways. One way, they make us feel as if we can reach out and touch the roof of our galaxy. The other way, they act as a magnifying glass, enabling us to look at what we think we already know in sometimes uneasy detail. Reynolds plays with our perspective right from the start of his collection in ''Spring Night in Caledon'', where we begin with our attention focused on a vegetable (''Spring comes up like an onion'') and end with that vast galaxy view (''I no longer know how I saw the world yesterday.''). In between, he sticks our noses in dung and rotting garbage and makes our eyes water along with his own.'
The Northern Review