Cannibal Rats

Governor General’s Award-winner Richard Greene’s remarkable new collection, Cannibal Rats, is rich with searing wisdom, complicated grace, and magisterial craft. Reporting from locales as disparate as the Civil War battlefields of America and the storm-worn shores of Newfoundland, “where, as almost nowhere else, you can hold / in hand the inner substance of the world,” Greene bears witness to historical injustices, meditates on how “art and memory unravel” under the auspices of mortality, and wrestles with the loss of a beloved mother. “[T]here’s a limit to what the heart can learn / without pause and repair,” he writes in the stunning travelogue that ends the book, “but I should return / to this place of bayonets and canon, / small gesture of one still living to what is gone.” Cannibal Rats is a major accomplishment from one of Canada’s most accomplished poets.