Forests of the Medieval World

Don Coles has earned a reputation as one of Canada's finest contemporary poets with books such as "The Prinzhorn Collection" and "Little Bird." In his new poetry collection, "Forests of the Medieval World," he explores the power of memory.

Shadowy figures from the past -- a woman in a car, a child at the seashore, a father's college basketball teammates -- float through the poems of the book's first section. A modern tale of love is intertwined with an account of the destruction of Europe's medieval forests. The poet recalls the baseball games and adventure books of his boyhood; he dreams of what death would be like for Cambridge University's Wren Library; and he listens to long-dead fathers' giving counsel to their troubled daughters' in a nursing home.

Rounding out the volume is a haunting sequence of poems about the private world of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. The Edvard Munch Poems' were inspired by Coles's reading of Munch's diaries, which are still largely untranslated. Best known for his famous work The Cry, ' Munch was a lonely and painfully sensitive man. He returned obsessively in his paintings to the pivotal events of his early life: the deaths of his mother and his beloved sister, Sophie, and his adolescent affair with a married woman, the mysterious Fru H.' The departure point for each of these poems is one of Munch's paintings and most are offered in the voice of the artist himself. Coles, whose collection "K. in Love" explored the inner thoughts of writer Franz Kafka, is a master at suggesting character through the nuances of poetic expression.