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Part of the second set of poetry books by young Toronto publisher The Mansfield Press is a first collection, Among Ruins, by Toronto writer Christopher Doda. The Mansfield Press, with previous poetry collections by Ann Shin and Margaret Christakos, to name a few, has impressed not just through quality work, but elegant looking books, even with the change in designer for the second batch, from Brian Gee (sometimes ECW Press designer) to Darren Holmes (Michael's brother).

Doda has been publishing quietly around Toronto, here and there for some time now, in journals such as Exile, The Literary Review of Canada, and The Queen Street Quarterly. His poetry, thick with Keats and Auden, and images washed in broad strokes, feels like an older kind of writing, not necessarily that of a "new" collection of poetry, but still with a slight subversive bent - "I have watched a man become death, // It takes hours; this bold process, / Freezing the veins, draining / The hue of life, preparing // This public execution" (p. 17, "In The Twilight Cafe"). He writes of surrealist and impressionist paintings, and a fascination with death, as he writes in the poem, "Coughing Up Blood" - "So, I am a poet now," and writing of "A silent fear / Of the staring spectre whose wide / Blood eyes gaze out / From the upturned skull and / Slide into its mouth, like bleeding / Yolks of foetus eggs laid out // For my consumption" (p. 7). In lives that shift from morbid to mordant, Doda explores the ruins of interior monologue, and dark corners of the so-called soul. "If war is politics by other means, / Victory is a clutching hand outstretched, / The moment when life becomes / A whim of a conquering general, / When goods and slaves of defeat / can be simply wasted" (p. 35, "There Are No Conquered Cities").

scarf is a second collection from new Toronto resident and poet shannon bramer, after her 1999 collection suitcases & other poems, which was awarded the Best Book Award that year by the Hamilton Arts Council. Unlike her first, loosely-themed collection, scarf is a fragmented first-person narrative series of poems, written through the eyes and disassociative voice of Vera, who works in a scarf store. "Please to meet you, I am Vera. I have muddy green eyes and a few grey / hairs mixed in with a lot of brown ones. I have no family, only you" (p. 13, "let me introduce myself"). The poems in "scarf" move around Vera working in the scarf store, trying on scarves, watching a customer choke to death on a mint, or how she says in "the factory and me" - "My affections for Hamilton sprung out of my love / of the factory. First of all, the factories make sense to me. I like to imagine / myself giant-sized, making my way around them in the dark" (p. 18).

Vera seems oddly disassociated with the world around her, with few friends; an attraction to inanimate objects, and a fear of the real, as when she takes the mannequin's head home, or spends her days digging a hole in the back of the store, closely associated with the scarves in her shop. "The car spun out of control one hour from Thunder Bay. My mother left me / bleeding inside / because she thought I was dead. // Vera said she would return once she got over the shock" (p. 43, "the accident").

What impressed me so much about the first book, suitcases & other poems, is also here, poems with resonant grief, fragile glass and desperate love, carved carefully and spare out of cold, dark objects, achieving small, remarkable poems. scarf is an intriguing book about loneliness and searching, of mental illness with all the complexities of a novel. Shown through the character Vera, we see the world as she becomes increasingly lost but somehow still hopeful, with such beautiful lines cutting through the dark - "I want to find Lawrence and ask him how to change / my name, how to be a warrior, how to fall in love with / someone who brings / me water" (p. 69, "I did not choose the scarf store").