Poems for a New World

Connie Fife is one of Canada’s warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as a transforming force for people of all colours so that they may breathe the air of freedom, the air of a world rich in biodiversity. Revolutionary as they may be, these poems also care about language, about how language can become the food and joy of life. As she says, “I have prepared a bowl of ripened poems / with which to ease our hunger,” placed an “empty gourd” beside the bed of love which waits “to be filled by our stories carried / across the heartlands of distance we will have travelled.” These are poems of revolution, of love, of inspiration.