Selected Comments

About Belonging

"There is not a poem in this fine book that fails to move me. The book is called Belonging, but it is the 'longing' part of that word I feel here most-the sense of a lost past that frays away, 'one thread at a time.' But Shreve's past is no sentimental abstraction-it is peopled with parents, with great aunts, with the fascinating woman Emma who was also the man Franklin, with the poet's sister who had cerebral palsy. Their stories do not "grab for heroics," and they compel our interest for just that reason. Articulate and beautiful, the voices in these poems are ones you will be glad to have heard."
                     —Leona Gom

"Finely crafted poems about family relations, memory, longing, identity - the ordinary in everyday life elevated to prayer."
                     —Susan Musgrave, The Vancouver Sun

"... an articulate and beautiful investigation into a vibrant past peopled with fascinating and compassionately rendered characters..."
                     —Suzanne Buffam, Feminist Bookstore News

"... a wonderful book of moving poetry. The poems in Belonging are very human and will stir the heart of any reader."
                     —Penny Ferguson, Pottersfield Portfolio

About Bewildered Rituals

"Shreve is an inquisitive, socially conscious, and form-fascinated poet. Bewildered Rituals includes a sestina, a villanelle, a triolet, prose, free verse, and haiku. The opening poem, "Learning to Read," effectively interweaves the artistic and the personal. "Rituals of War" is a fine polemic, while "Making Love" is a tender lyric. ... she is at home with her Muse, particularly when she evokes her "home" landscapes, whether East or West Coast ... Shreve is a significant, soon-to-be-major poet."
                     —George Elliott Clarke, Books In Canada

" ... a lucid and intelligent book of poems. The author blends events from her private life with concerns about major social issues in a skillful melding of micro- and macrocosm. ... The skill, the lucidity, and the emotional power of this book make me think that she has returned to most of the poems 'again and again.'"
                     —Don Precosky, Event

"Her link with Bronwen Wallace is strong... Whether spring cleaning, celebrating Halloween and Christmas, doing office work, gardening, or ice-skating the poet is an acute observer and social commentator."
                     —Anne Burke, Canadian Book Review Annual

About The Speed of the Wheel Is Up to the Potter

"... Her first collection of poems from the workaday world is rooted in the common grind and an uncommon eye for what gives it significance. This verse is sensitive, clean and strong."
                     —The Ottawa Citizen

In "Allegiances" Shreve challenges the accepted version of early New Brunswick history from a particularly female perspective, and in doing so creates a new historical vision in the form of herstory. Shreve is the voice of women, who, like a ghost ship that has "coursed this coast/for centuries" laden with "versions of her tragedy," is "waiting to be heard."
                     —Louise Noble, Queen's Journal

Sandy Shreve's works copyright © to the author.