Wow. Stephanie Bolster’s A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth is itself a wonder of precision and economy. It’s a poetry collection about collections: zoos, mostly, but also gardens, which are collections of plants, as well as collections of quotations from a variety of texts and, in the “Life of the Mind” poems which recur throughout the book, collections of the writer’s own thoughts and sense impressions, like epigraph poems arranged in couplets. It’s melancholy and filled with awe at the same time. I was knocked down by A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth; no wonder Bolster won a Governor-General’s Literary Award for her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems. I read this book quickly, something I had to accomplish for work–it’s a busy day, which explains the brevity of this response–and I want to return to it again, soon, this time to savour it.