The Killing Room by Marilyn Bowering is presided over by the voice of a witchy female, a persona we may recognize from the work of other contemporary poets, most notably Atwood, Musgrave, and MacEwen. At its best this can be a peculiarly compelling kind of poetry; at its worst it can seem like mystification to no apparent purpose. The voice of the witchy female seems to specialize in mysterious narratives which are meant to be highly symbolic, full of secret, inaccessible knowledge about blood and bones. This volume as a whole and many individual poems in it have too much in the way of symbolic events and not enough hints of where interpretation might go, not enough statement in relation to myth. For all their attempt at rich suggestiveness, the poems therefore seem thin…. [In Bowering's poetry] the voice suggests that it possesses ancient and shared knowledge, yet...