The aptly named Nerve Squall, this year's $50,000 winner of the Griffin Prize's Canadian division, is an excitable collection of poems about birds, fish and clouds. Not that they are separable, since the thumbnail sketches with which the author decorates her book often depict guppy-like creatures swimming through cloudbanks, or poultry apparently caught in a hurricane. With the book's first word-string, Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris begins as she means to proceed.
