Passport (New Writers)

In some ways more of a glimpse-by-glimpse autobiography than a verse collection, the poems of Passport feel like a vivid, bumpy trek out of Newfoundland, by bus, boat, and ferry, into the very heart of Canada.

Born into a Island family, haunted by a cruel, redeeming, widow-making sea, Angela Hibbs transforms the plain, moving intervals and sometimes lurid bric-à-brac of a Canadian working class upbringing into something as gratifying as loose tobacco rolled into a mail-slot flier for smoking after a long day. With her mother, newly enlisted in The Canadian Forces and seeking a better life at a succession of mainland bases, the young poet finally escapes The Rock. She takes along her uprooted, meticulous gaze, memorably describing the peripatetic, close-quartered, nervous life of army families and their offspring.

Hibbs writes a nimble, sidelong poetry versed in the language of exits and pounced-on opportunities. With a talent for capturing the least obvious, most significant detail, Angela Hibbs transforms the plain matter-of-fact into something glistening and enduring.