NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Fifteen short to medium length poems are included in this 20-page booklet by Ferguson,a graduate student at the University, many pre-published in magazines in Canada and elsewhere.

Some of the poems relate to the wild life of the Marsh, as GOLDFINCHES NEAR COOPER MARSH:

	dozens of saffron  
		skybound bubbles

	bursting above
		a sunflower field
         
		swerving
	effervescent 
		flight paths

	carbonating
		a champagne sky

THE CREEK BEHIND MY HOUSE starts bravely with

	black rubber boots
		succumb to brown water
	deep down in primeval muck
		in wet sponge mud

	clay holds on
		to your boots
	and as you squirm free
		smacks its chops
	like a smiling boy
		hungry for hotdogs

	the hulking mother roaring
	with less and less ferocity
	the cub whimpering
	for hours by
	her cooling snout

	twitching this death
	by a bright copper wire

	silenced and plush
	to the trapper's hand

Jesse P Ferguson is a poet and musician based in Ottawa, Canada; the handmade COMMUTE POEMS is his third chapbook. The twelve poems here mostly concern themselves with the relationships between humans, nature, art and the built environment. In FALLOUT AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY for example, the small songbirds that crash against the glass of the art gallery and:

	make a soft applause of negligible impact
	with their downy bodies on the concrete steps below.

	fracturing the bonds of greenness
	playing havoc in the spectrum
	a painter's nightmare

In EMILY CARR, Ferguson commemorates the life of the Canadian artist and writer (1871-1945) who

	......saw what western tribes saw:
	everything sees and so she put more watchers
	in her paintings than can be counted up and down
	her carved beams and cabin faces