Monday Magazine gives glowing review to Warland's Blue

Only This Blue review

In her short essay at the end of Only This Blue, Vancouver poet Betsy Warland writes, "poetry may be as close as we come through language to the sacred." Such is the case with Only This Blue, a sparse, evocative series of poems that speak to the physical and metaphysical experience of breast cancer and mortality. Confronted with questions of life and death, it's only fitting to turn to the sacred. Warland's finely crafted poems hit perfect, clear notes, using recurrent colours-- reds, greens, yellows-- as motifs to carry the reader along. To read this book through is to go on a dream journey with the poet, to experience alongside her those distilled moments of daily life that give definition and meaning where none can otherwise be divined. Crisply clear images find themselves space to breathe, arranged sparsely on the page.... [R]eading this book-- it's a deep breathing exercise of life-affirming beauty. To read the poems as they are presented is to achieve or attain a certain kind of clarity, if only for the duration of the reading. Fortunately, like a mantra, it can be repeated and repeated, lived within and lived with, until one has found the sacred rendered or revealed in words.