Gathering Wild
Published by Brick Books
431 Boler Road, Box 20081,
London, Ontario, Canada  N6K 4G6
Table of Contents


Order Info: Kitty Lewis, General Manager
Tel: 519-657-8579 (brick.books@sympatico.ca)
http://www.brickbooks.ca
13.9 x 21.6 cm, 48 pages, ISBN 0-919626-35-1, $7.50, 1987

Gathering Wild is Marianne Bluger's third collection of poetry... Bluger knows her voice. It soars out from Gathering Wild with a surer purpose than ever before, perhaps sadder in some way but magnificently stronger. These days Bluger has achieved what she could only dream of ten years ago, a distance that lays open a thinking heart and a wise soul. The tone is firm as the Canadian Shield. It is these foundational attributes that bear up the beautiful rhythms of Gathering Wild. Bluger directs her language with a new verve; almost every poem has distinction. In the poem The Flute Player, the poet uses only seventeen conservative lines to show us not only the flute player but what all music attains at its best. The same acute sensibility is in play when the poet says (to someone who has not captured his heart's desire), "It's a moment of bitter weakness / when I say to you, Jim, / the habit of sadness just isn't enough / and it isn't enough / because it isn't joy." The rhythms in Bluger's work are deftly handled, mature and incredibly varied for such a short book. I urge you to track down this work.

(From a review in Poetry Canada Chronicle, by Brian Vanderlip.)