Larder
Author: Rhona McAdam Category: Poetry Publisher: Caitlin Press Published: May 1, 2022 ISBN: 9781773860831 Pages: 72 Country: Canada Language: EnglishWith enormous care and unquenchable daring, Rhona McAdam explores our relationship to the living world and challenges the constraints of contemporary poetry in her latest collection, Larder.
The Tyee recommended it this way: “Gardeners will love Rhona McAdam’s Larder, which considers the wireworm, the wasp, the wild bee, the ant taken over by zombie-ant fungus. Empathy with living creatures and plants that surround us doesn’t just mean understanding life, these poems emphasize; it also means getting one’s hands dirty with death and decay. “Preserving is work / and work is prayer, and this is a wall of it,” McAdam writes in “Abbey Root Cellar, February.” If that line plucks your heartstrings, dig into Larder.”
Reviews
Malahat Review
London Grip
“Larder has a cover which is not only beautiful in itself but is also—unusually—a good indicator of what to expect from the poems. It’s about detail and texture and intimate sensory kinship, about rendering the subject as perfectly as possible, about arousing the viewer’s senses. McAdam is an ecologist and nutritionist with a poet’s eye for detail, for the inter-connections within the natural world, with a relish for words and how to place them in ways that create fresh associations.
The British Columbia Review
“..I admire this book. From its lavishly gorgeous cover (a still life of fruit in a bowl by a little-known female painter who lived during the 1600s) to its closing expressions of gratitude, reading it is a rich, almost fattening experience… The word larder is an old-fashioned one, from days before refrigerators. Built far from any chimney or other heat source in a home, the larder was a cool room or cupboard for food, dedicated to the storage of meat and fish and other perishables. The poems in this book, nearly all of them food-themed, constitute a very well-stocked larder of words and ideas… clarity of language is a hallmark of all her work, not just the poems in this book. She combines clarity with imagination – and another element essential to great poetry: sound.”