A poet who can do woodstoves and chain saws, Matt Rader, who grew up in Comox and now lives in Oregon, is not a nature faddist. Living Things (Nightwood $16.95) is a slim volume that shows a highly familiar knowledge of trees, plants and birds which did not get picked up by browsing a field guide.

In a poem from a longer piece, Lives of North American Trees, the poet gets hectored by the "heart on sleeve, bad skin"; arbutus.

"Windfirm. Hardscrabble. / I unravel a standard in the rock and grime / of the subsoil where you too will return/ in the post burn of your life.";

Rader's nature is specific; there's not an airy abstraction to be found. The poems about compost exude the sweetish scent of semi-decomposition.

"Chipped enamel of egg, cuttings, kitchen chaff,
coffee grounds ground down to earth by a staff
of earthworms, the compost moulted in its spot
at the garden's verge, a fetid incubator of rot....

End-rhymed, cadenced and often in formal patterns such as sonnet, there is nothing sloppy about these wry observations and they are very informed.

Sit with one of Rader's tree poems, close the book, close your eyes, and there is his exact tree. You've been momentarily away from your self, the tree took you away.

"Little hobgoblins of muck,"; frogs drag the poet, "nightly by the mind rushes / into the reeds, thrash me with sedge and leave / me for a moment, mugged of myself, relieved."; 9780889712232

by Hannah Main-van der Kamp

[BCBW 2008]