Kevin Irie: The Tantramar Re-Vision

John James Audubon, Whooping Crane (Sandhill Crane), 1835. Image from Museum of Nebraska Art In the marsh grass, wind stirs up some business I don't know about. This exciting news about sandhill cranes taking up residence in the salt marshes between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick sends me back today to Kevin Irie's luminous book of poems, The Tantramar Re-vision (McGill-Queen's, 2021). In these poems, instances of the extraordinary sometimes leap, sometimes slide into a landscape of shifting moods. Something moves downstream past thinking of us: Encounters are as likely to be with conundrums and meditative correspondences as with things. How did it end as a small dark brush sweeping the earth up into a stillness like an answer