Mario Relich Poetry: 'There is nothing provincial about the poems in Mario Relich collection. Local at times, yes, with evocations of the poet's various home bases, but as the likes of William Carlos Williams and Patrick Kavanagh would remind us, the local is the universal. (...) This poet is of both the Old World and the New, intensely European in his range of cultural references, but also transatlantic, whether evoking family and university life in Montreal or verbally transcribing, as it were, a postcard depicting the Civil War memorial in Hartford, Connecticut, and linking this with that city's poet Wallace Stevens, himself redolent of European imagination and American experience. (...) It's chiefly in the poems about birds - one type, of course, is the source of the book's title - that we witness, in Muriel Spark's phrase, 'the transfiguration of the commonplace'. (from Tom Hubbard's Introduction)
Review by Bashabi Fraser 'Mario Relich uses words as the artist uses colours to make the commonplace magical and the abstract meaningful. His poetry has the power and freedom of bird flight, refreshing and adventurous, lightened by his humour and emboldened by his erudition'