Nerve Squall in the Winnipeg Free Press

Nerve Squall (Coach House, 112 pages, $17), Saskatoon writer

Sylvia Legris's third collection, is neurotic in the best sense. Edgy and unsettled, the poems are also whimsical and fluid.

"Crossing the nerve squall is crossing from eye wall to eye," she writes in Nerve Storms, highlighting the interior weather at work in the book.

Legris's writing doesn't so much link images as it picks them up, carries them for a while, and then puts them down in a different spot. Birds, clouds, fish, and horses circulate, connected by puns or allusions.

Into the Bizarro Squall provides a good example of this play: "Crayfish, craw (Daddy don't choke on surprise!). Split-open sky, spitting wind, and yes/ those are cows on the roof! Fish at the window!//Caught caught caught in whirlpool and drama."

The result of this movement is a collection that works through a

dream-logic, where up is down. The elements speak, but can a listener hear?

Legris's world is full of language, from the "loquacious, articulate birds" in Ravenousness to the "half an alphabet" lying on the ocean floor in Fishblood Sky. Awareness, however, comes only through nervous connections.