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True Concessions
Winner, Archibald Lampman Poetry Award and Ottawa Book Award
These poems chart moments where the beauty of life is glimpsed like a carnival through a crack in a fence. The verse is full of living toys, dressing up, and daylight ghosts. His world is peopled with gods and heroes and inventories the luminous, devastating details of everyday lives. Poile discerns that love is an odd mix of a fairy princess and the monster under the bed. Tracing a firm entry into middle age, Poile favours the expression of a shared experience of the world as opposed to the youthful desire to be unique. He vaults between two worlds: an outer, urban landscape where people raise families, make a living, and get on in the world and an inner terrain of thought and emotion. Metre and rhyme both underscore and undercut Poile’s subject matter, and he captivates with texture and sound.
Although his work is informed by tradition, his language is grounded in the quotidian, setting up a fruitful dialog between past and present. There are no rules when it comes to making a poem that sings and shimmers.
