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.
Slant Room marks the book-length emergence of a poet whose work, already startlingly assured, is gaining national recognition. The poetry of Michael Eden Reynolds transforms both the Yukon’s terrain and such everyday objects as a refrigerator through the use of arresting imagery and spare, dense language, finding a musical equivalence that is rare in contemporary Canadian poetry. ‘... I knock/ a cup of sugar cubes, it spits across/ the tabletop: metric archipelago.’ The book’s four sections include the spacious landscapes of ‘Spare Room’, an elegiac dream-suite, ‘Migrations’, and the strange mindscapes from the title section. The finale, ‘Fugue’, shows the poet expanding his repertoire in a suite of interpenetrating sonnets that wormhole from the past through a catastrophic future. Reynolds’ voice, reminiscent by turns of the imagery of John Thompson and the musicality of W. S. Graham, is nonetheless distinctive, and finally original. This book is: ‘... a room that makes you:/ the way that rock was split, awed,/ mouth filled with rare plants and meltwater.’