In Review: Plump and Sumptuous

Open Wide a Wilderness, Nancy Holmes ed., Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009, 510 pages.

Nancy Holmes, a professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, is to be congratulated for this plump and sumptuous anthology of English language Canadian nature poetry.

In Open Wide a Wilderness, two centuries of poetry by over 190 poets are assembled in only 510 pages. Although it enjoys little mainstream attention, Canadian poetry is strewn throughout the myriad inconspicuous little seeps and rivulets that feed the watersheds nourishing our ...