Review of Patrick Warner | The Irish Literary Times | Scoop.it
From web.uvic.ca - October 27, 2013 8:08 PM
The Malahat Review, established in 1967, is among Canada’s leading literary journals

 

The last poem in Perfection, “Thanksgiving,” turns on a marvellous change of focus and register at the end of a trio of lines. The speaker drifts into an awareness of how his particular life compares to Life. Insurance has just made it possible to buy medications (“two puffers, one steroid”) to help heal a child with a cough so violent it jerks her like a marionette and sends the family to the hospital: “I thought about this as I lay awake at some ungodly hour / next to my wife, our two children asleep downstairs / while all around us, invisible, lay the earthly poor.” T