The Woodlot – Our Mandate

Welcome to the Woodlot! My father once told me after I received three university degrees, and had published two poetry books, that I had a gift: a gift for stacking cordwood.

I happen to think writing a good poem, or a strong collection of poems, is a lot like stacking a wood-pile. You have to place a stick or bolt of wood against the next piece so a balance is maintained, much like setting type inside a chase, or words inside a line of poetry. A piece of wood (and often an image) needs to be jostled, twisted, flipped, and aligned for an even aspect to match the last row with no gaps, ending off with a double criss-crossed stack to keep the whole edifice from tumbling down.

Here at the Woodlot, we will be reviewing Canadian poetry collections. Why? We
believe there are not enough critical thinking, spirited reviews of poetry books in
Canada. We are not publicists. We are fellow poets who are “gifting” our time, and our intellectual labour, to give back to the poetry community. Each critic chooses which books they wish to review, so there might be overlap sometimes. So it goes.

We will accept queries for essays about poetry by individual Canadian poets, but we would prefer publicists for small presses to reach out to us about their Spring and Fall poetry lists. Some critics might prefer to review from a PDF; some might prefer from an advanced reading copy (query@the-wood-lot.ca).

We will not be writing “negative” reviews, but we will be writing reviews that ask hard questions of the books under review. Not all books are of the same quality or calibre, so let’s not pretend that they are. If you get angry because we reviewed your book and we pointed out that a few poems were less successful than others, might I suggest you don’t look a gift review in the mouth? But I get it. Poets work hard on these books. And deep down, underneath, we all want to be universally loved.

But the role of the reviewer is to point out both the merits, and maybe not flaws per se, but something to be worked upon further, in a poetry collection. We are not interested in cutting down anyone’s orchards, or ‘feathering our own nest’, or nailing down the ‘X’ in Canadian Poetry Excellence. “Taste makes fools out of us”, said the great American poet-essayist-editor Donald Hall and I tend to agree with him.

Chris Banks
Editor-in-chief