Weave

Lisa Pasold’s poetry collection, Weave (Frontenac House), reads as a memoir of the twentieth century in a world bounded by Prague and Peru and the Russian front and the shores of Lake Ontario. The narrator is a traveller and an exile, and she seems to be perpetually in transit. Her brother Wilhelm serves as mythical interlocutor, and we are led by their sibling love into and out of the darkness of Europe. Weave is quite simply a masterpiece: there is more in these eighty-odd pages than in most novels. The narrator tells a story told to her by a survivor of World War I: “You understand what I mean. The dead / came from everywhere.” And later, in the parenthetical poem“(Canadian Winter),” she says: “ I climbed out the winter, I mean, the window, / waist deep in the snowbank / I was in diamond- patterned pajamas.” Buy this book at www.frontenachouse.com.