NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

CREATURES OF THE INTERTIDAL ZONE is a collection of poetry rooted in the natural world, more specifically rooted in ice and ocean and the journeys made across them by humans and animals. The poems include haiku and tanka, two villanelles and a number of poems showing skillful use of end rhyme, as well as extensive use of internal rhyme. Richardson is a poet who knows how to use the sounds and rhythms of language.

There are poems here based on the experience of the men, including Scott and Shackleton, who explored the Antarctic and others based on stories of the Scandanavian heroines Gudrid and Freydis. There are several poems about penguins, including the humourous villanelle BOOKSHOP BLUES:

	I wish I could leave this book's orange spine.
	I've been Great Fiction's symbol for too long.
	It's time someone thought up a new design —

	I acquired a real flair for plummeting,
	and still rate my first bungled landing
	as the greatest achievement of my life.

	                permeates everything,
	inhabits a layer beneath her skin
	like permafrost under the tundra.

	I've had my fill of fighting the sun, of his summers
	of abuses — each part of me that meets

	the sea's been bitten ragged.

	God is getting hot. Big chunks
	of god keep breaking off.
	God will force the waters of the world to rise —
	and he'll capsize much more than a lone Pacific atoll

	for god knows that most people have stopped
	believing
	in ice.

	for the whiskered nose of inspiration,
	for a flippered urge to surge to the surface

	just let it
	breathe