Denise Cammiade's poems sing with honesty and lyrical grace. In this, her first and last book, she writes with piercing insight of creatures human and otherwise; of the forgotten meaning in waves, birds, everyday moments. Befitting such stellar work, The Creature I Am boasts superb production values, and features beautiful colour illustrations by Jenny Munro.

"Denise Cammiade's brilliantly realized poems are elegant in their formalism and radical in their use of language."  —  CAROL SHIELDS

"These poems are like diamonds hardened under the pressure of fierce feeling and intelligence, dancing with their own unborrowed light."  —  ALICE MUNRO

"Over and again in Denise Cammiade's poems there's that quick side-shift of vision which may seem to be a lurch but turns out to be dance. It leaves you seeing things from a whole new angle - the crows with their stage-villain stride, the rain stapling down. Language comes to the service of precious orbs of perception, and helps us hold them close.  —  DON MCKAY

"What a gift we have been given! Denise Cammiade has turned 'this single long note/this howl' that is a life into poems of remarkable beauty and insight. At home on the West Coast, she makes use of its particulars and its people to praise her time on earth. The loss you find in these pages is expressed with startling honesty and with an eye that refuses to turn away from the wonders and terror of love. She describes the drawings of Van Gogh as 'crucibled in pencil.' So are her words. As she says about him, she has found her calling - 'a single passion pressing down'- in the writing of these extraordinary poems."  —  LORNA CROZIER

Jenny Munro is a painter who lives in Toronto. She has studied at McGill University, Beal Technical Institute and the Victoria College of Art.

POETRY • 48 pp • 4 interior colour illustrations • 6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-133-X • paper • $16.95