The Strength of Materials

By: Rhea Tregebov

January 2001
76 pages | ISBN 0-919897-76-2
$15.00

Holding her elegiac lens up to life, Tregebov shows how, in our fragile world, even traditionally joyful subjects are compromised, tinged with loss.... With Strength of Materials, Tregebov joins the ranks of distinguished Canadian elegists such as George Bowering, Dennis Lee and Jan Zwicky. - Canadian Literature

The Strength of Materials suggests a world in which every elegy is an ode and every ode an elegy. These poems both praise and commemorate the material world in all its beauty and fleetingness; they speak of rejoicing through grief and grieving through joy, of loss and recovery, of bereavement and resilience. The Strength of Materials delineates the gifts this perishable world offers its unsuspecting human inhabitants.

Reviews

• Poems you really ought to read (George Fetherling, The Vancouver Sun, 2/16/2002)

Other Titles by Rhea Tregebov

• (alive): Selected and new poems (2004)