August 17, 2015 – Thank you to the Midwest Book Review for the beautiful review of The Signficance of Moths:
The Significance of Moths
Shirley Camia
Turnstone Press
206-100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, R3B 1H3
www.turnstonepress.com
9780888015334, $17.00, 96pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: Against the backdrop of the changing seasons, Shirley Camia’s poetry comprising “The Significance of Moths” offers a graceful exploration of home and memory through the eyes of the migrant and the migrant child. As lives are displaced by new landscapes, where does home exist? In the land or in the mind? For new Canadians and their children there is no easy answer. In the journey to form identity, “The Significance of Moths” confronts the ghosts of “what was” with the here and now.
Critique: ‘The Departure’: the day was full of years / packed in a broken suitcase // as mama’s lip quivered // a violin string / played a sadness / that rang until hollow // a cry for her old life / and the lives she let go. Clearly, Shirley Camia is a poet of impressive abilities to evoke emotion from the written word. “The Significance of Moths” is one of those collections of free verse that will linger in the mind and memory long after the slender volume has been finished and set back upon the shelf. Highly recommended for community and academic library Canadian Contemporary Poetry collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that “The Significance of Moths” is also available in a Kindle edition ($9.99).