The Brevity of Red AUTHOR: Jill MacLean ISBN: 092183392X 96 PAGES $14.95 CDN $12.95 US SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN HIRSCH AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE ATLANTIC POETRY AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE ACORN-PLANTOS AWARD   ABOUT THE BOOK: The Brevity of Red is the product of long reflection on loss: of a daughter, a sister, parents; and of familial stories. These intelligent, vivid, carefully crafted poems honour the dead, yet they avoid easy answers. Although they affirm the power of love and are centred in the personal, their tendency is centrifugal. Dramatic monologues in the voices of Hannah, Isaac, Job or a Mohenjo-daro carver of seals are reinforced by meditations on ancient artefacts that connect us to a vanishing past whose human pain, savagery, whimsy and redemption illuminate our present day ironies and "joys / with the soil still on them." With fresh metaphors and emotionally resonant images, MacLean questions those places where we seek solace: our artistic imaginations, our religious traditions and myths, as well as the entrancing, but arbitrarily cruel natural world from which we spring. Always she calls us to attention within this moment. Her language is focused, her descriptions clear and precise. Though the mood is largely elegiac, it is also wry and surprisingly edgy, as it reaches for the grace notes of celebration.     "The Brevity of Red is a book of poems that charts the landscape of grieving and of love. In the midst of a poem, in the heart of loss, this poet gestures to the sky, to the trees, graces us with the names of the flowers, and points out the birds. If hope has a muscle, call it poem and here's a collection that's alit from within." —Sue Goyette "In poems that range from galaxies to mitochondria, from the brutalities of accident to the smiles of belugas, Jill MacLean's first book tracks an exhilarating sweep of lived experience. With image after image — whooping cranes feeding through holes in ice, the sound of a Tibetan singing bowl, "the small punches of your pulse" — MacLean views her world with clarity, compassion, and insight. Her craft is versatile, her language colourful as lupins, sharp as mint." — Brian Bartlett