Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941–1987)

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. It was recommended by someone I respect immensely, but I suspect it's one of those books you read at a certain point in your life, and it takes on meaning because of that. This is not that point in my life. I was excited by the prospect of the title and the structure, but found the poems to be relatively uninteresting - a lot of reflection/insight that seemed overly sentimental and essentially cliché. The language too relied so show more heavily on easy turns of phrases, clichés, sayings, etc. There are some really surprisingly fascinating lines, but they are few and far between. The sequence at the end, "The Nine Arcanum of the King" was the most interesting part of the book - a pseudo-myth narrative set in what appears to me to be ancient Egypt. show less