“Button is able to vacillate between the personal and public in a way that focuses the eye on the individual petals of a singular flower and then travels back out to view the entire garden… Heron Cliff is about the interconnection of people and how shouldering someone else's pain brings us closer to our own humanity. 'Listen to her sobs,' Button writes, 'her small sorrows/as keen as ours.”

— Event

“In 'Blue Dahlias,' the brilliant long sequence that concludes the book, moving house has become a reality. Button employs a series of ghazal-like stanzas to maximum effect, each one consisting of five (mostly) autonomous couplets. Ghazals are by their nature oblique–structurally, thematically, emotionally–their only connection being the creative consciousness of the individual poet.  Traditionally, ghazals include exclamations and questions, a device that also works well in Button's hands, and the form in its modified way is well suited to the onrush of observation and emotion at work … Button's work is full of passion; Heron Cliff is a generous book and a good read.”

— Barbara Myers Arc Poetry Magazine

“Victoria writer Margo Button's third book, Heron Cliff, deals extensively with personal history. She's travelled a lot and has an interesting family, so the material is worth mining.

Sometimes the result is mostly prose: "On the wall hangs a photo of Chamcook Lake/where he hunted deer with his brothers." Sentimentality spoils some pieces too: "Then Andrea moved in/trailing giggles."

The strongest work here is the long series of contemporary ghazals titled 'Blue Dahlias.' Partly because of their formal constraints, these pieces are filled with precise observation and emotional nuance:

"Death camas swath the park in blue. My thin friend sits in the sun/in long sleeves and wide hat. One round of chemo to go./The lost-purse dreams have stopped. I searched every city./And for what? Mating robins and loud-mouth crows."”

— The Winnipeg Free Press

“As a mother, I can't imagine anything worse than the death of one of my children. Margo Button has not only experienced this horror, she continues to find ways to write about it, albeit in this collection more even-handedly than she did in her first, The Unhinging of Wings. The book presents a kind of resolution to her grief--not a mask pretending that her sorrow over Randall's deathis gone, but an acceptance. These poems seem to come from a place where grief has been absorbed into her pores and becomes part of her, something like the scar that's left when a vital organ has been removed.

The book opens with the long title poem, "Heron Cliff," a poem about moving away from the family home where her son took his life. In it, Button asks: "When we move house, can the past/be discarded like old furniture?/The steps where I found him dead./The gazebo built in his memory./The sea where he makes his bed."

The center of the book is made up of two sections, "Home Truths," and "Reconaissance Mission." Both consist of poems about relatives, friends, and past experience--and of course, Death. But the poems here contain many surprises. For example, Button is not a person I would have expected to come out with these lines: "this is the house where I begin/to stop loving my mother." In addition to revealing her as a woman full of surprises, these poems confirm her as a writer who has honed her craft. I love the way the lines interweave with each other in "At the Cottage": "I used to sit on the balcony weaving odds/and ends of sleek silk, knobby wool./while my son scoured the shore for crayfish/and bright stones he brought to enrich/the tapestry. Penelope at her loom, I/wove the ins and outs of our lives while/mournful loons would wake us at dawn."

While her poems have always been lean and uncluttered, these surpass some of her earlier work; the poems feel as if they're charged with a new sense of urgency. This is especially true in the last section of the book, "Blue Dahlias." An extended poem in fifty-nine sections, the piece was a co-winner of the Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize in 2005. It is composed in couplets which are ghazal-like in their reliance on metaphor. Even though they may lack some of the other elements of the traditional form, many of the segments do conform to the rules and are strong enough lines to be able to stand alone: "Inuit remain comfortable with long silences./Ice and snow are their teachers."

Obviously a poet who reads broadly, Button's work demonstrates how effectively she uses the work of others (in this case, Mark Abley) to riff off in her own direction: "Chasing barn swallows, the dog's in her glory./In the Yuchi language God is a verb/and there is no word for temptation./Birdfeeders hang from the eaves beyond reach."

For the most part, the language Button uses is simple. And perhaps for that very fact, her poems appeal to something basic and visceral. I always find it a good sign when a book urges words out of me, inspires me with new lines for my own poems. As I read Heron Cliff, I kept needing to stop, pick up my pen, and scribble something down before I could go back to her poems. On many levels, including Button's ability to move on with life, this book is a very good sign.”

— Heidi Greco Prairie Fire