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There
are some rough and wild birds around Howe Sound — West Coast avians like
the sharp-shinned hawk, the northern harrier, and the whiskey-jack. Heather
Haley, an accomplished mapper of human migration, pair-bonding and predation,
takes these feathered frenemies as her starting point in this assured
third collection, Skookum Raven. Like her foremothers and contemporaries
Gwendolyn MacEwen, Susan Musgrave and Karen Solie, Haley writes sophisticated
free lyrics of a witchy feminist kind — but adds some proletarian ferocity
with her bus-station grandpas and sketches of iffy guys like Ed the Fence.
These are astute, austere poems which sometimes take flight into optimistic
beauty — this book is “pockmarked with luck.”
Skookum Raven is a text for the tricksters within. With spondaic
pow-bams of language, these lyrics harness neologistic energies to evoke
punchy lust, back alley bravado, and coastal croonings on sex, the wild,
music and time.
~ Catherine Owen
Tart, taut and terse, Haley’s honed poems of lust and loss, wrath and
remorse are imbued with hard-won insight and subversive wit. Her wry
x-ray eye cuts to the quick in an array of deftly drawn portraits that
will make you grin with recognition. Haley is a master of assonance,
consonance and dissonance, intermingled with flashes of a distilled
lyricism.
~ Fiona Tinwei Lam
Heather Haley’s Skookum Raven honours the west coast with
brilliant side-eye observations couched in words drawn from a wide palette,
from Chinook trade language to Pussy Riot. She brings us on a stroll
through the village, showing the underbelly of every house and garden,
then deeper into domestic disharmonies and unease in relatedness, writing
sharply from a woman’s point of view. If any reader has become lulled
with the beauties of west coast living, she will shake you into more
fulsome awareness of the “hard blessings” shared. “No lotus-eaters we…”
~ Joanne Arnott
Poet, novelist and musician Heather Haley pushes boundaries by creatively
integrating disciplines, genres and media. Her writing has appeared in
numerous journals and anthologies, she was Poetry Editor for the LA Weekly
and publisher of the Edgewise Cafe, one of Canada’s first electronic literary
magazines. She is the author of poetry collections Sideways (Anvil
Press), Three Blocks West of Wonderland (Ekstasis Editions),
a debut novel, The Town Slut’s Daughter (Howe Sound Publishing)
and the new collection, Skookum Raven (Ekstasis Editions).
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