Poetry Reviews

“Joyce demonstrates that he is one of the finest poets working in Canada today. In lines that are energetically taut, elegantly crafted and wonderfully luminous, he brings the reader to the brink of feeling utterly vulnerable in a world that strains toward destruction. Tethered by his belief in Nature’s ability to renew his spirit, Joyce looks unblinkingly at humankind’s fall from paradise...”

—Ernest Hekkanen, author/publisher/editor, New Orphic Review

“Excellent…” —bill bissett, poet/artist on The Charlatans of Paradise (New Orphic, 2005)

“Romanticism is not a dead school of poetry. We still have our 21st century successors to Blake, Shelley, and Wordsworth, poets not afraid to criticize civilization while they celebrate the natural world. Joyce belongs to this tradition. He returns us to our intuitive powers, our hidden senses. Joyce already possesses many of the gifts which take a lifetime to master.”

—Mick Burrs (Steven Michael Berzensky), poet/artist, on Star Seeds (New Orphic, 2009)

“Joyce’s language is often haunting and his insights powerful. …Here is a poet who is deeply in love with his landscape, whose imagery, again and again, is drawn from the raucous natural world around him. In reading Joyce’s most recent collection of poems, I often find myself in a trance-like state, letting the sheer musicality of the language wash over me.”

—Brian D’eon, author, review of The Price of Transcendence (New Orphic, 2015)

“A first-rate collection.” —Tom Wayman, poet/author on The Price of Transcendence (New Orphic, 2015)

“Joyce has already distinguished himself as a poet of great range, brilliant technique and musical qualities. In an age when many poets do not rise above mediocrity because they ask too little of themselves, writing uninspired prosaic pieces that display no rigour, Joyce’s poetry is always striking, structured and memorable. He never falls into opacity or obscurity, being always reader- (and listener) friendly. His work also avoids triviality, instead often achieving universality of thought combined with emotional intensity and appeal to the imagination.”

—Roger C. Lewis, Professor Emeritus of English Literature, Acadia University

“This is a terrific piece, full of surprise after surprise in terms of language and perception, ranging from the vocabulary of the classics to down-home diction. …Your crow seems to me the voice of a more apocalyptic time, prepared to take on larger issues than Hughes or Kroetsch’s raven poems and What the Crow Said took on, and doing it equally well.”

—Gary Geddes, poet/author, on Dead Crow and the Spirit Engine