A Blue with Blood in It, the latest collection of poetry from award-winning poet Elizabeth Philips, resonates with the rhythms and colours of a prairie landscape. Reminiscent of her fellow Saskatchewan poet Lorna Crozier, Philips casts the reader into a carefully tended garden that is lush with verdant imagery.

Sensual images of sun, wind, flower, and fruit underpin themes of love and desire, connection and separation, growth and decay. Nature, and particularly the vibrant colours of nature, becomes the medium through which people find one another and themselves. In the title poem, lovers caress against a backdrop of wild blueberries and the unseen, but felt, presence of a bear: “In the background, indigo/shadows, live, wind-whipped darkness, stippled/like fur. We kiss, slow but wary, eyes open.” In the poem “Yellow,” a bed-ridden man is reminded of his life through a dream of marigolds: “This morning, he who has smelled nothing for the last year/inhales the sharpness of marigolds, each breath measured/by a century of prairie summers … and each slow hour is yellow, yellow, yellow.”

Beneath these sensually charged images lies a complex interrogation of the paradox of nature. Juxtaposing images of wild prairie and cultivated garden, Philips reveals the violence required to create and maintain a sense of natural order. By the end of the book, the conventional conceit of “the natural order” becomes as ephemeral and transient as Philips’ shifting imagery itself.

Though the themes and settings of the book may be familiar, Philips’ work is set apart by the sheer energy that quickens
her poems. It is this endlessly cycling energy – of language, image, and form – that is the lifeblood of A Blue with Blood in It.