bridge from day to night

An accomplished new collection by Governor General's Award-winning poet DavidZieroth.

The title poem in David Zieroth'sthe bridge from day tonightfollows the speaker across the Second Narrows Bridge to North Vancouver, a well-worn moment in a daily commute that opens a window into the sublime: "from the apex / of the bridge with traffic flying / I look directly into / their deepest clefts." Such moments occur throughout the collection, as Zieroth explores the resonance built from layers of such ordinary moments as they accumulate throughout a lifetime-indistinct and imperceptible as they occur, but creating unseen undercurrents through memory andtime.

In this temporal landscape, the natural world becomes a touchstone, both entangled in and standing apart from the speaker's internal narrative: "I brought from that forming hour a / precise smell of foliage: funeral wreaths / bore an acid scent." Shifting fluidly through time, the speaker grows from a child to understand, reflect and then outlive his parents. Finally, the collectionlights on the incongruities and contradictions in death: "still later I kick his flattened corpse / to the gutter, and it skids on concrete / a broken valise, weightless / on this segment of thejourney."

With his characteristic humour, subtlety and ability to find transcendence in the everyday, Zieroth traces the delicate strands connecting the most minute and familiar details to the most profound mysteries, giving voice to theunknowable.