Love of place is a staple of poetry. (Seamus Heaney, for instance, would be a very different poet without Irish peat bogs.) All the same, it can be a tough theme to make work over even the slimmest volume. In Cypress, her third collection, Barbara Klar meets this challenge with passion and grace.
    Rhapsodizing about Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan, Klar shares Heaney’s rich evocation of the unique fingerprint of place that arises from interactions of climate, flora, fauna, and landscape. She once worked there as a tree planter, and clearly, the place got under her skin (literally).
    Klar’s writing most strongly resembles the work of U.S. poet Sharon Olds. Like Olds, Klar often employs startlingly visceral imagery: “This/ is a lodgepole to be buried beneath, hair roots/ worming through vertebrae, tap roots cracking pelvis….” She is less interested in poetic memoir (or pseudo-memoir, as the case may be) than in channeling the life force experienced with up-close observation of plants and animals, as well as with the phenomena that nurture (or threaten) them.
    The results fairly bristle with metaphor – more fanciful than clear in some spots – and develop a mythology all their own, built of foliage, water, and, above all, stone: “Stones are the vertebrae of hills,/ripe apples, brains packed with/ the alphabet of glaciers,/ stones are eyes with moss lids….”