Reviews

---

Review by Jay Ruzesky

A larder is a food storage closet—some used for aging meat, others for storing provisions to bring forth through the lean winter months. It would be reasonable, then, for this collection of poems to be a cornucopia of slightly withered vegetables; instead, it is a remarkably coherent assemblage of fresh poems that centre on the poet’s other passions: food and nutrition.

McAdam is a seasoned poet whose considerable understanding of craft is evident. These poems are tasty with surprise and delight: in “Wild Bees,” for example, the busy insects do a “day’s work / and a day’s work and a day and a day.” The second section turns from the outside garden world to the table, where bananas are “nature showing us how to package.” The final two sections become more philosophically complex, and nature and the garden become metaphors for aging, such that a description of the processes of flowers is also a way that some people live: those who “pour their hearts into making roots / larding their store of sunlight / into bulbs the colour of winter moons.” In “Be Vigilant My Body,” the speaker says, “I have no training in mortality,” and later in “Penumbra,” the sun in eclipse finds its way through trees “releasing itself as if nothing on earth mattered.”

Ruzesky, J. (2023). [Review of the book Larder, by R. McAdam]. The Malahat Review, (222), Spring 2023.

---

Review by DA Prince

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 Music of Nature

The opening poem, “Anna’s Hummingbird,” shows she can create the urgent excitement of spring. This balance between richness and simple directness in language is one of the ways McAdam explores connections with the natural world. In “Tent Caterpillars,” she shares her enjoyment of how they grow “into their skin / and gilding bristle, / until, lions at last / they bask on tree limbs.”

The Culinary Perspective

McAdam brings a cook’s practical knowledge into her poems; she knows about textures and ripening and how the outside world of weather and season ends up on the kitchen table. In “Caramelized Garlic & Squash Tart,” she tests out long lines to great effect, catching the sense of place and time through the evocation of “cheese as white and soft as the snow beyond the window.” “Fruit Cake” recognizes ingredients for what they have become: “the buckshot of currants / have lost the desire for round.”

Shadows and Mortality

Despite its wonder, Larder isn’t all idyll; the poems move towards an acceptance of the pressures of living in the present day. “Home is a Different Country” remembers how the Covid pandemic changed society, framed in simple, unsentimental realism. The final section tilts towards frailty and the vulnerability of the body. What underlies this collection is an urgent political argument, recognizing the value of everything in nature.

Prince, D. A. (2022, November 12). London Grip Poetry Review – Rhona McAdam. London Grip.

---

Review by Alison Manley

Compact but never brief, Rhona McAdam’s poetry collection is a masterclass in using language to create the most vivid imagery. McAdam’s poems dive into nature without reservation, treating plants and animals with love and joy. This collection runs the range from beautiful to grotesque.

Structure of the Collection

Larder is divided into four distinct parts:

• Part 1: Insects, animals, and the outdoors.
• Part 2: The food we eat, including titles like “Meat,” “Cheese,” and “Jello.”
• Part 3: Harvests and weather.
• Part 4: The dying of the year and the end of life.

In “Salad,” McAdam both laments the stretched definition of the word and honors what a real salad ought to be:

Such atrocities in your name:

sculptures of jelly and cabbage;

ring moulds, milky and pink;

canned fruit and marshmallows.

When all that was asked

Was leaf from the garden, something green (p. 41)

Manley, A. (2022, October 24). Larder: Poems by Rhona McAdam. The Miramichi Reader. https://miramichireader.ca/2022/10/larder-poems-by-rhona-mcadam/

---