News from the Feminist Caucus, by Anne Burke This month reviews of Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity , by Lorraine York; Dark Water Songs , by Mary Loy Souter-Hynes, Archive of the Undressed , by Jeannette Lynes, Einstein's Cat by Zoe Landale, and The Boreal Dragon: Encounters with a Northern Land , by Kate Bitney; Previews of Escape Velocity , by Carmelita McGrath and This House is Still Standing , by Adrienne Barrett. The Calgary Women's Centre is moving at the end of September and needs volunteers! . There is a widespread belief that women have achieved equality. However statistics show that there are still many equality gaps that prevent Canadian women from fully participating and excelling in society. The impacts of poverty on women are significant. Women experience poverty at a greater rate than men. In Alberta, women continue to lag behind men economically, earning only 68% of what men earn for full-time, full-year jobs. Minimum wage earners are far more likely to be women, many of whom are raising children alone. Women are often further marginalized by age, ethnicity, ability or immigration status. Many injustices are still occurring today, here in Calgary and around the globe. Last year, a youth in our city was the target of a hate crime because of her sexual orientation. Just recently, Pride flags were stolen and burned at a Pride celebration in Fort MacLeod, Alberta. Around the world, policies and practices stemming from prejudices against LGBTQ individuals are the cause of violent trauma, incarceration, exile and death. The current situation in Russia is a prime example of these injustices http://www.womenscentrecalgary.org/who-we-are/why-a-womens-centre/ The Calgary Women's Centre Movie Night featured "Gen Silent, a critically acclaimed film addressing the challenges faced by aging LGB women and men. Admission was free to anyone who identifies as a woman. http://blueskiespoetry.ca/react-act-community-together/ Subject: Flood poems for The Calgary Project Hi Anne, Nice to see you the other day, and hear your presentation. I'm intrigued by your flood poetry work, and wondered if you'd be interesting in submitting anything to our anthology project? It's called "The Calgary Project - A City Map in Verse and Visual". It will be co-published with Frontenac House, and co-edited with Calgary Poet Laureate Kris Demeanor. We've had an amazing response to this project so far. You can read the call for submissions here: http://blueskiespoetry.ca/react-act-community-together/ You can also peruse the Blue Skies site to read the wonderful work that has been submitted. Cheers, Dymphny Editors: blueskiespoetry.ca forum Dymphny Dronyk Editors: Frontenac House/House of Blue Skies print anthology Kris Demeanor, Dymphny Dronyk Previous House of Blue Skies anthologies, Writing the Land (2007) and Home & Away (2009) were both bestsellers. Works from these anthologies were also featured on blueskiespoetry.ca prior to the launch of each print anthology. blueskiespoetry.ca is a forum for emerging and established poets to find a wider audience for their work, with a particular emphasis on writing by Canadians. Review of Dark Waters, by Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2013) 92 pp. paper The scansion of some of these poems resembles that of George Herbert, a seventeenth- century Christian poet. By this comparison, I do not necessarily mean the obviously Biblical sources from the New Testament and Catholic religious practices, such as the rosary. Whether or not directly influenced, she employs similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in the best of their secular poetry and in religious poetry. She appears to adopt a common poetic style, use of figurative language, and manner of organizing the meditative process or poetic argument. The "Notes from the Citadel" was written on the occasion of the 2008 annual general meeting of the League of Canadian Poets, in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. She appears to identify as a Caribbean/Canadian woman, with translations from the Spanish, and mellifluous allusions, for example, creole as a person born in the colonies, a committed settler, evolved from a distinct culture in the former plantation societies. Elsewhere, she accounts for her creativity, in her own notes, as “precisely from the space between, that marvellous open space represented by the hyphen”, which she credits to another. Ephrasis is evident throughout the collection, beginning with Pinturas ciegas , or “blind” paintings. In “Antiphonal Openings”, she remarks, You’ve been there before — this antiphonal space where poetry is — She dedicated “In Your Ain Town” to William Soutar, whose Scots' poems she discovered when she was searching the web for genealogical information on her Scottish great-grandfather, Simon. She contemplates “the keeper or lighthouses” who worked “By Force of Habit” and also responds to a rail journey “From Perth to Edinburgh”. She was a fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland, in September 2009, when she worked on this collection. Part I “In the Manner of Tides” conveys metaphorical extensions of light and river or sea imagery, from the trope “Dark Water Songs”. The epigraph is from Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997). She is preoccupied by a self- acknowledged “Geography of Voices”, engaging the rhythm of reefs, tides, island pools. A key poem contains “Dispatches From the River”, an elongated “winding path”, encircling coded signifiers, “From tree to/tree to tree.” In Part II “Close to Home” she combines family history, with dance, storm, story, moving ultimately “from Dark / To Dove”. She reminds us, with “Island Songs: A Suite”, “beneath all this, / “a deeper tide —“, for which: The poem’s path breaking line — its canvas muted blue. (In “A Way/Around Stones”) Some of her work appeared in a chapbook anthology, The Long Dash (Toronto: Sixth Floor Press, 2005) and this fact may account for her inveterate use of it, or else, perhaps, simply “serendipities”. Other poems are in the anthology Resonance: Poetry and Art (Toronto: Sixth Floor Press, 2008). In Part III, “Slippery”, she enshrines observations of natural occurrences which portend incipient significance, for forest, flower, bird, all infused with or “ full of grace ” by an unseen Divine presence. You shall know Him/Her by His/Her works. She assumes a “Prussian blue”, “their crimson certainty”, “memories” are green, “quality” is golden; “black earth sprouting green”, “maple red”; “October’s golden”, and “brick-red”. In Part IV “Other Gravities”, she admits, Don’t look now, but I can be undone/by words — .......................................................................... These in-between spaces... of language-to-light-on (“Senza Titolo”) The poet is rendering drowning by shafts of light and dark, imbued with unidentified and unidentifiable energy, in “The poem, where drowning is easy.” (“On Renderings”) She embraces labyrinthine paths, promises, panicles, petals, and pilgrims; she ponders, pans, probes “their many-/ storied layers.” (“Tread Softly”) This is an accomplished, polished collection by a mature poet- educator and will be a suitable addition to her previous titles, Travelling Light (2006) and The Fires of Namin g (2001) both published by Seraphim Editions. Jeanette Lynes is the author of one novel and five collections of poetry. Her novel, The Factory Voice (Coteau, 2009), was longlisted for The Scotiabank Giller Prize and a ReLit Award. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and has won The Bliss Carman Award. She has been Writer in Residence at Saskatoon Public Library, University of Manitoba, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, among other places. Archive of the Undressed is Jeanette's sixth collection of poetry. She has taught writing at the Banff Centre and The Sage Hill Writing Experience. She is Coordinator of the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan's Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity and a member of the Department of English. Review of Archive of the Undressed: Poems, by Jeanette Lynes (Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 2012) 78 pp. paper $17. This collection of new poems were inspired by popular culture, as Lynes explores, in an introduction, “Begin the Slow Peel of Elbow Gloves”; based on conspicuous consumption of cartoons, even the print advertising, in vintage Playboy magazines. What she was seeking is “an alternative world of undress”, not the prefabricated of “All strip, no tease.” For direct rather than vicarious experience, she enrolled in a neo-burlesque class, for exposure, of the Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” type. I admit to a fetishist attraction to Marilyn Munroe, in some or all of her manifestations. Making love to the camera, on film or in still photographs, she posed for calendar “shots”. I recall, perhaps, my first encounter was at a local gas station. The school bus was late and a few of us used that as a pretext to wait inside and warm-up. Red just happens to be my favourite colour. Her bowed lips, the cherry-nipples, the blood-red drapes, she was on display, utterly composed. For Lynes, “The Queen’s Bush” is a popular name for a pioneer era of Ontario, applicable to the country and terrain north of Guelph, wink, wink . One of four Playmates, “Brit” is naturally nude, “before she hits the library in her plaid suspenders.” An ageing “Bettie” is advised, “The centre cannot fold” (hold ). The Original wore a boa. Costumes devolve to flesh. Hugh was once a boy, with ambition, The Wife of Bath, one of many pilgrims, an ekphrastic on the horror of Dorothy Stratten’s brutal murder. In sum, “There’s always a body”; “There’s Always a Mansion”. Margaret Trudeau once was a “botanical bride with a brain.” There is a visual poem, “YOU READ IT FOR THE ARTICLES”.