I started reading Yvonne Blomer’s The Last Show on Earth in April, during Poetry Month, but with the rush of April grading and the exhaustion that followed after my marks were submitted, I ended up putting the book down and not returning to it, despite all of my intentions. Friday afternoon, while invigilating a student’s make-up examination, I decided I would try again, which meant starting again. I’m glad I did. This is a beautiful and powerful book.

Full disclosure: I’ve met Yvonne, and I’ve taken creative-writing workshops with her. I read her 2017 memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling From Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur several years ago and thought it was wonderful. She has probably forgotten more about poetry than I’ve ever learned, which is humbling to acknowledge, given what I do for a living, but that’s just the truth. That knowledge is evident in The Last Show on Earth‘s use of fixed forms (ghazals, glosas) and the way some of the poems play with line and with sonic effects (rhymes in surprising places, assonance, alliteration).

From the title, and from what I know about Yvonne’s passion about ecological issues, I expected the title’s “last show” to be us, our civilization, but this book is about more than climate change and oil spills, although those make appearances here. The title poem, an ekphrastic response to a Robert Bateman painting of an abandoned circus train with nighthawks circling over it which begins the book, sets an ominous tone, particularly with its last lines: “Luminous / empty moon. Feral moon. Night’s coming, coming in.” But there is joy here, too, particularly in the poems about Blomer’s son–the book tracks his life from birth (and before) to his fifteenth birthday–and in comic poems about her marriage. The grief I expected to find here is certainly present, though. It’s both personal and political: Blomer’s mother’s death is explored in detail, as is the ongoing anthropogenic environmental catastrophe. These two concerns come together, too, in poems like “This ocean is a room for the dying, Tahlequah,” in which the orca grieving her calf is read against Blomer’s mother’s death and her toddler (I think) son playing on the grass outside the window of her mother’s hospital room. Other losses are marked: the poet Patrick Lane, who was a friend of and mentor to Blomer; elephants; the thousands buried in pits outside Vilnius, Lithuania, murdered by the Nazis. But there’s just as much wonder here as grief. Part of that wonder is in the language of these poems. I made notes on the poems as I read them, and the note I scrawled at the bottom of “Sharp on the palate this last show on earth,” a poem about a street performer who swallows objects, is a simple “wow,” a word I find scribbled elsewhere as I flip through the book, trying to describe my response to it.

Maybe my favourite poem here is “How to live in history,” which was written when Blomer was Victoria’s poet laureate, although it feels ungracious to choose a favourite from such a rich collection. The city’s then-mayor, during a polarized election, asked for a poem, and Blomer read “How to live in history” at the first city council meeting after the votes were counted. That poem concludes that “part of language is listening,” particularly to the sounds of the places around us, an activity that must be repeated: “Listen again.” I wonder if it had an effect on Victoria’s councillors. It had one on me.