Full depth: the Raymond Knister poems

By: Micheline Maylor

April 2007
86 pages | ISBN 1-894987-17-9
$17.00

Raymond Knister was a rising Canadian literary star when he died mysteriously of drowning in 1932. In this debut collection Micheline Maylor considers the circumstances surrounding Knister’s sudden death and captures the voices of those caught up in this tragedy with deft poems. Treading gently through innuendo and rumour, Maylor draws the reader into the story with finely-etched portraits of the characters and their imagined emotions. Yet in the end the Full Depth allows the reader to come to their own conclusions, with Maylor’s light touch giving an empathic insight into the depth of the tragedy.

Reviews

• The Poetics of Love and Death (Anderson Araujo, Canadian Literature, 11/11/2008)
  "Maylor's imagistic poetics and exquisite lyricism ensure an enthralling read."
• To The Point (Claire Young, Calgary Herald)
  "With beautiful simplicity, these poems trail the scent of ripe tomatoes. They stroke the skin at the nape of the neck. And they leave on the consciousness the imprint of a tentative footstep in snow."
• Review (Anne Burke, Feminist Caucus, 12/1/2011)
  “[An] extraordinary collection or sequence of poems.”