Dark Woods

Description

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018Snow, canoes, frozen ponds, lonely conifersDark Woodstakes the motifs and landscape of a Canadian childhood and examines their place in a world of smartphones andoverflowing inboxes. The result, Sangers first book in 16 years, is a striking new collection full of mysteries and reassessments, wordplay, slang, and sonnets, meditations on parenthood and the cracks in the granite: those urges that wont go away, and the people who have.Praise forDark WoodsThe rueful, lucid, deliberately casual poems in Dark Woods can surprise you with their tenderness, but also with their prickly intelligence. The New York TimesIn the poems accentual, lightly metered stanzas we are made conscious of time passing, the body aging, and those quiet moments outside timeunderstated and moving. The Malahat Review[Sangers] poems are tender and often funny. Sometimes arch, sometimes bemused, he is a humane observer of daily life.Throughout Dark Woods, his cleverness and verbal mischief enliven traditional forms. Canadian LiteraturePraise for Richard SangerSplendidly-shaped and imagistically adroit. These are outstanding poems.The Globe and Mail[Sanger] naturalizes the traditional influences in his poems so thoroughly they are almost covert. This gives his poems an inner voice running under the colloquial surface and suggests an attitude toward consciousness in a lyric poem as interesting as the dislocated subject Books-in-CanadaSpectacular Sophisticated metrical sense, teasing wit and limitless linguistic resources The real thing: an original poet of rare talent. The Montreal GazetteVery accomplished [Sanger] writes in a voice that is all his own, and its groundtone is a cleverly, progressively sophisticated one which is never merely adroit. Journal of Canadian Poetry