SOURCE: "Dead Reckoning," in Books in Canada, January-February, 1990, pp. 42-3.

In the following positive review, Brandt discusses the language, syntax, and poetic structure of Mouré's WSW (West South West).

Erin Mouré's virtuosity dazzles. WSW (West South West), her newest collection of poems, is filled with the kind of energy, the quick movement from hand or eye to sudden landscape, dream, or memory that we have come to expect in her writing. There is also the continuation of her preoccupation with language, the precise and eloquent questioning of structure and syntax and surface, elaborated as a series of questions at the end of Furious (which won her the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1988). Here, theory and practice merge in a vibrant poetic dialogue between speaker and poem. There are few poets in English-speaking Canada who are capable of such relentless self-questioning within the text without losing...