Blood Rises [Paperback]

Praise for RECLAMATION by David Haskins. Borealis Press, 1980 Haskins' work has authority by Peter Cooney, for The St. Catharines Standard This is nature poetry in the grand manner. David Haskins, a former Brock University teacher, has welded together Canadian literature's obsession with landscape, and the naturalist swagger of a Ted Hughes into a first book that speaks with unusual authority. Haskins' universe is, like his language, spare and unyielding. Danger lurks here. Elemental forces rage. At first, the focus is stark. But gradually, Haskins' images evolve from those of serpents rising out of the sea to claim their birthright, to those of houseflies copulating on a ceiling. They assume an enhanced reality until like words on a page held too closely to the eyes, they grow blurred, distorted and vaguely threatening. Everywhere, Haskins confronts demons; in his morning coffee, in the birth of a child, in a house cat's midnight creeping. And he embraces the contradictions of the natural world with its violent beginnings and ends; its raucous celebration. Reclamation strikes a chord because its English-born author proceeds forcefully and with some haste. The best of these poems resound with some of the energy of Ted Hughes' Crow poems. No adolescent whimpering here about survival and the lonely land. Haskins succeeds most brilliantly as craftsman. Witness his evocation of sexual love, or the simple dignity of a friend who grows peaches. Your wrinkled fingers wrapped aroundl3£