Whether speaking in the voices of seventeenth-century French fur trader Pierre Radisson, nineteenth-century British explorer David Thompson, or settler Thomas Scott, the man Louis Riel executed during the Red River Rebellion, Paddy McCallum has an uncanny ability to conjure the slap of a birchbark canoe through northern waters, the sting of "salt-packed/logs set free from boom/and blade and fire," and the scent of reindeer moss, cranberry, and moose scat. Metamorphosis reigns in McCallum's universe. A traveller becomes a gargoyle in an Italian piazza, a man may or may not be a marauding...
Whether speaking in the voices of seventeenth-century French fur trader Pierre Radisson, nineteenth-century British explorer David Thompson, or set...