On Nights Like This
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
13.3 x 20.9 cm, 40 pages, ISBN 0-919626-25-4, $6.95, 1984
Although On Nights Like This is a slim volume, it is an exciting
collection nonetheless. Bluger's strengths can be located in her attention
to the twin energies of form and content in verse. Her writing communicates
an accurate understanding of what it is that makes a poem a poem. Each
word, each phrase, each line economically reiterates the notion that nothing
can be added, nothing can be subtracted, nothing can be rearranged.
You burn me - Sappho
is one example of Bluger's impressive gifts:
The tenderest blades unsinged,
there hangs in the air
no smoke from the blaze of an autumn.
But here in the shade of birches
to think of you suddenly
scorches my skin.
Bluger sticks close to poetic bone throughout On Nights Like This.
Whether she examines natural phenomena or illuminates human nature,
it is abundantly clear that a powerful sensibility is at work in these poems.
(From a review by Judith Fitzgerald, a Toronto poet and
freelance writer, in the Toronto Star, 1984.)
Selections from On Nights Like This:
The Hunt
Poem of Winter
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