In just her second collection, Shadow of the Living Brightness (Coach House Books), Dominique Béchard has joined the front ranks of Canadian poets. In a book billed as a “theopathic exploration” — and it is that — Béchard enters a tradition occupied by the likes of Margaret Avison and Travis Lane, composing poems of great, seeking beauty.

Indeed, it’s breathtaking to read her virtuosic rendering of a questing faith, a consciousness held both quaking and questioning in the face of what she’s unafraid to call God. For example, in the mourning poem “After Tragedy,” Béchard writes, “For days now, the fear / that some god — ungraspable, final — will reveal itself to me.” Or this, from “Epektasis” (the title itself is a Christian concept that describes the soul’s unceasing progression in its relationship with God):

When Moses encountered the burning bush, he felt his knowledge both vaster and
Scurrying off, as looseness in the cortex, snowfall in the dark.

If there were no God, would earthly matter be more or less real?
And to what extent would my attachments be recast?

As the above passage demonstrates, Béchard’s writing slips into heartbreaking questions of immanence, then takes up theological argument, and always roots down into the speaker’s relationship with herself and the world.

The devotional material on offer is thick, making such a collection extremely risky, working unabashedly as it does against the longstanding popular antipathy toward the religious. A response to a letter written by Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess who founded two monasteries, the first poem, “Prelude to Eternity,” gives the collection its title in the form of its refrain (“shadow of the living brightness”). The second poem is titled “Trying to Pray.” The third, “Withdrawal,” enacts the (unnamed) principle of via negativa:

I crave more unbecoming’s
reversal of harm:
entering the vacant
city, open-palmed to lose
my my, its millennia
of attachment to the idea
of human progress.

What progress? What can we accomplish, collectively, by being still and letting go of accomplishment itself and allowing our souls to grow in epektasis? Béchard takes the old ideas and renders them beautiful and sorrowful; any poet would kill for the two lines that open the snippet above. I have no doubt: This book will enter the Canadian canon and deserves to provoke the American literary landscape, too.

*****

It’s no surprise that the author’s note in Béchard’s book thanks Sue Sinclair. A philosopher of beauty, Sinclair is part of a related tradition of lyric philosophy that involves the Canadians Jan Zwicky (and, through Zwicky, Wittgenstein), Don McKay, Tim Lilburn, and — connecting with Béchard — Travis Lane.

When I invoke these names, I invoke a quiet kind of meditative observation as it pertains to nature — we might term it a weak messianic ecopoetics that refuses to over-value divinity and instead focuses on the close observation of nature. Sinclair’s New-Fangled Rose (Goose Lane Editions) very much maintains this tack, but, if anything, its trajectory is angled further up than in her previous collections.

In “Gleaning,” a meditative poem about bees, she wonders, “Am I looking for God when I say this?” In the poem “In the Wild,” she asks, “Have you cried religious tears? As though God were an irritant, / an onion you’d accidentally sliced into.” And in “Ecstasy,” she admits that, as a child, she wanted to be a nun, a “desire I still half feel.”

As with Béchard, the sense of the sadness in nature is palpable here, but the sadness is more comfortable and lush than excruciatingly static. Consider the immanence on offer in “Hospital Bed”:

That order — good order,
impartial order, an order of the right kind —
can save a life? Which it can. But the roses,
their perfume, unclenched and roaming —
they suggest the life unseen in its comings
and goings, the something more we feel
inside things.

With Sinclair, the beautiful facts of the world are proof of something as much as they are a balm. Though the learning is worn more lightly by Sinclair than Béchard in terms of allusion and outright citation, her stance is rooted in phenomenological, mystical, and Wittgensteinian traditions of philosophy. Through them, she offers a poetics that insists upon the materiality of the world itself, its simple standing there, its excess beauty. Take, for example, “Idyll”:

The toad’s muddled back,
lumpen pelt: just the right measure of ugly.

The June bug’s whirr
reminds us of the distance between here
and anywhere else we’ve been.

…How long before happiness appears?

Here, we have a progression that is the reverse of Béchard’s. Close observations of nature lead into questions that seem deceptively soft and idle until one realizes there’s an ache dead-center in Sinclair’s career-long interrogation of beauty. In New-Fangled Rose, happiness isn’t seeing what’s beautiful or even appreciating what’s beautiful. Rather, it’s looking up at the sky and reasoning whether what’s beautiful on earth is perhaps mirrored.

To close by returning to “Hospital Bed”: in the last few lines, the speaker is “climbing / above where we are and looking down / like we imagine the sky might if it loved us / like we love the sky, like we love the roses.” Sinclair’s poetry and its great questions are aimed at the earth as much as at the heavens.

Shane Neilson is a disabled physician whose What to Feel, How to Feel: Lyric Essays on Neurodivergence & Neurofatherhood came out in 2025.