June – July 2009. The Scoop (Tamworth, Ontario) reviewed Hooked by Carolyn Smart. The reviewer Jeannie Harrison wrote ” HOOKED is a sensational book of poetry about the difficult (you might say twisted) lives of seven infamous women addicted to drink, sex, love, murder and/or art… HOOKED will not disappoint.

June 28, 2009. In the Halifax Chronicle-Herald Stephen Clare writes “N.L. bard combines two loves: verse, hockey – Poems tell story of NHL goalie” – an interview with Randall Maggs. “in the poet’s latest offering, Night Work; The Sawchuk Poems. “Of all of those legendary figures, no one’s story has ever intrigued me more than that of Terry Sawchuk,” says Maggs. “Everything about the guy was an enigma.”

…”The book is a biography of sorts,” points out the author. “I spoke with many people who knew Sawchuk well, including several ex-NHLers, and they provided me with a unique and insightful perspective of him both as a person and as a player.”

…”Even more rewarding for me is seeing hockey fans exposed to poetry and vice versa,” says Maggs. “The two really aren’t as different as we might think, and it is amazing to see that collectively, as a people, we can understand and appreciate the raw power and beauty of both pastimes.”

For the full story, see http://thechronicleherald.ca:80/Books/1129627.html

June 2, 2009.

Jan Conn, poet, biologist.  It is Jan’s biography, I believe, that makes her work completely different from anyone else’s, that gives layers to her words that we can unravel. She writes with the vivid imagery of Latin America fuels Isabel Allende’s genius, yet the fact that she is a scientist drives all of the mysteries within her words. These mysteries meld ancestral spirits into the cells and veins and wings of vines and birds and dust. Conn is a nouveau alchemist of sorts, knowing transformation is indeed the stuff of cellular biology, the very thing that will save ecology if we can. As a scientist, she spends her time chasing mosquitoes, and it is this attention to the smallest of things that brings ours to the big ones. Conn does sweat the small stuff, for it is the very stuff of life.

And if life is made up of atoms and of cells and molecules, literature is made of up of alphabets and words, funny black marks on a page or stone tablet that magically record the way we see the sky, the way we feel anger, the way we make love or go mad. Conn takes us to “the fable of pink, the agony of yellow.” We visit rooms “crammed with blue statuettes of the dead.” We are transported to a world with guavas and saffron and copper-winged chameleons and antelopes and alligator skulls.

“The Henry Moore bronze/resembles a reclining chacmool/ on whose chest fresh hearts were laid.“

 The ancient mythology of the Americas, all fury and magic and hotheaded passion and sacrifice, and she brings these potions and powders and temples and mermaids and warriors and virgins and volcanoes into the unruffled cool of Canada. It is strange and sublime to hear a scientist tell us with conviction that the gods are alive.

An old subject, but a fresh approach – The history of love poetry is the history of poetry itself. One of the oldest known fragments of written verse consists of a few mushy lines of Sumerian cuneiform; it begins, “Bridegroom, dear to my heart, Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.” It is a priestess talking to her beloved king. She continues, “You have captivated me, let me stand trembling before you; Bridegroom, I would be taken to thy bedchamber.” It’s pretty racy stuff coming from the same people who invented such practical things as the wheel, irrigation and shoes. But it reveals a basic human constant: All of us are spellbound to some degree by love.