Selected Comments

In Cartography, her fifth collection of poetry, Rhona McAdam weaves an imaginative passage through the territories of love, work, family and aging. The journeys she takes her readers on are odd, familiar and memorable: we travel with her through startling and sensuous reflections on love, office paperwork and corporate layoffs; teen murder, truck stops and dementia.

Here we find poems about suitcases, shoes and vegetables imbued with the same wry compassion with which she suffuses her portraits of aging parents and meditations on marital status and childlessness. The world of her poems is completely and evocatively imagined, with humour and humanity, but also a sense of control, and bears traces of the poet's own movements, from England through Europe and back to Canada. Her themes are never overstated, and reveal themselves cumulatively through the course of the collection. With a mature and original command of her craft, she reveals a sensitivity to form, and to the ways rhyme and meter can enrich a poem.
                     —Oolichan on Cartography

The vivid imagery and concise wording hit the reader with an intrigue long remembered. Very quickly the reader is included in the relationship between mother and child on ear piercing; a sister searching for a brother held by terrorists in Lebanon; or an immigrant facing language confusion. Many of the poems leave the reader with a definite feeling that grows and deepens. The poems are thought provoking. Insight provides an "ah" by the reader in memory or with a moment to savour.
                      —Deborah Mervold, Shellbrook Composite School on Creating the Country

Rhona McAdam's works copyright © to the author.