E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The sixth issue of ottawater , Ottawa's annual poetry pdf journal, edited by rob mclennan , features work by various residents current and former, and is well worth the trip.

Last night, at Vancouver 2010, Sidney Crosby - now arguably the most important Canadian hockey player of all time, after, or even including, Wayne Gretzky - won the gold for Canada , in OT, in what could be claimed to be the most exciting and widely-watched hockey game of all time. Canada claims ice hockey as its own - though in truth, Americans and Russians have also dominated the sport over the years. But hockey's heart resides in Montreal, Toronto, and all points east and west. Canada's games have ended, but not without a bit of wry Canuck humour to water down the nationalism - Michael J Fox , William Shatner , and others added lustre, pathos and good cheer to a closing ceremonies that showed that what begins in tragedy, can end in comedy. I wish Great Britain and London all the best in their hosting of the summer games in 2012.

The rise of Canada as a force of nationalism to be reckoned with is underway with the BC games of 2010. The image of our victorious women hockey players chomping Sergeant Rock cigars on the ice, or our defiant brave and noble ice skater competing in the shadow of her mother's death, signal a new spirit, in a nation that is rich in natural resources, the arts, and had a relatively small banking crisis. Canada is one of the best countries in the world to live in - and its people are vigorous, enthusiastic, energetic, and proud. More than the sea and China is rising this century. So are we.

Liz Berry reviews A Republic of Linen by Patrick Brandon Patrick Brandon’s debut collection, A Republic of Linen , is full of the careful observation and vivid visual imagery we might expect from a poet originally trained as an artist. Through their quiet, precise examinations, the poems in the collection uncover the curious in the everyday, drawing the reader’s eye to that which is intriguing and moving about the commonplace worlds of home and childhood. In ‘Attic’, the poem from which the collection takes its title, we peer with the narrator through the bedroom window to see his “thin boned bicycle’s still chained/ shivering, to the railing’s below” (Lines 14-15). The swimmer in ‘Sunday’, feeling like a melancholic dolphin in the local pool, slips “Straight in/Straight out” (Line 10) of the showers with porpoise ease while “others soap/their naked selves like cars” (Lines 11-12). This is the key to Brandon’s skill: carefully refocusing the lens to show the everyday world as a strang...

Eyewear is very pleased to be able to return to its irregular feature series on poets deemed worth a look - worth a read. And more. The first of the poets I am happy to welcome to these pages in the new decade, this Friday, is Liz Berry (pictured). Ms. Berry was born in the Black Country and now lives in London where she is an infant school teacher. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines including The North , Poetry Wales , Mslexia, Poetry Review and Smiths Knoll . She is a winner of a 2009 Eric Gregory Award. I was happy to be able to include her performing the poem below on the recently released DVD, Asking A Shadow to Dance, 35 Young British Poets for Oxfam . This poem is also the title of her tall-lighthouse collection, out this summer. She's one of the best emerging British poets I have met in a long time. The Patron Saint of School Girls Agnes had her lamb and her black curls; Bernadette, her nun’s ...

Tom Phillips reviews The Girl with the Cactus Handshake by Katrina Naomi From the outset, Katrina Naomi’s strikingly titled and entirely adept first collection plunges us into a world of polarities. Each of the book’s three sections announces a gulf: between ‘The Natural’ and ‘The City’, ‘The Sea’ and ‘Margate’, and ‘Darker’ and ‘Lighter’. In the opening poem we’re immediately reversing along the course of the Thames, from the sea, through the capital and then back up country to the source. ‘The Thames Never Breathes’, in fact, hinges on a rhyme between ‘nothing’ and ‘spring’, the inevitable opposition between the human and natural joined via a route that’s not that dissimilar to King Lear’s: the renewal of a ‘tiny spring’ only accessible if you’ve been through ‘nothing’ first. The final poem, ‘Kennington, Southbound, 11.10pm’, meanwhile, occupies a murkier psychological gap, dramatising a late-night encounter on a tube station platform in a discomfiting pair of monologues by the woul...

The sale the other day of Action Comics #1 for a million dollars is both bound to raise a smile and a question. First, the nostalgia - my Dad once reputedly owned this comic, and sold it used for a nickel on St. Catherine Street, Montreal, when he was a little boy. Subsequently his mother threw out many other classic comics of the era, as he grew up. That's why these comics are so rare nowadays - spring cleaning and dog-eared over reading. That's the fun part. While I loved comics, and still do - and therefore am glad they are valued and collected - I wonder how many poetry books from 1938 are being bought and sold for a million in cold hard cash. Not many. I wonder, Eyewear fans - what book would you buy, if you could afford it, for such a mighty sum?