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Canadian poet Erin Brubacher’s In the Small Hours is a sequence of sparse poems which focus on the experiences and emotions underwent by the author in the aftermath of her divorce. Interspersed with memories from the past and encounters with the vitality of domestic objects, the collection shows the poetic persona making sense of her life and the world in meditative lyrics of great brevity. Drawing on Jane Bennett’s conceptualisation of “vibrant matter,” this article explores how Brubacher responds to the thing-power circulating within and around the bodies populating the Earth, whilst acknowledging a sense of communion with the more-than-human world.

The aim of this paper is to look at American poet Mark Strand’s thinking about what poetry is all about, as expressed in his poetry collections and prose works, especially in The Monument (1978), a book of “notes, observations, rants, and revelations” about literary immortality, but also a meditation on “the translation of a self, and the text as self, the self as book”; in The Continuous Life (1990), a collection of luminous pieces on various aspects of the literary enterprise, including reading, translation and the multitude of selves making up the self; and in The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention (2000), a collection of insightful essays in which the poet discusses the essentials of poetry as something made by the human imagination, the meaning or content of a poem, and the creative process with the guidance of such preeminent minds as those of Carl Jung, Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens.