the blades of grass are dreaming by Hollay Ghadery
A poetry chapbook from Anstruther Press
Anstruther Press makes beautiful chapbooks, and Hollay Ghadery’s latest is one you’ll want to leave lying about just to look at, possibly face down and opened out to see the full, wrap-around cover artwork by Charles Ruotte. True, we’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, but it’s lovely when a chapbook gets this kind of production quality. The cover art is a bit of a signal as to what you’ll find inside: poems that are stylish and carefully drawn, showing life under magnification, as suggested by the oversized flowers spilling across the pamphlet’s exterior.
“The poems in the blades of grass are dreaming are wistful and poignant, with the first-person speaker often seeming to be off to the side in some way, listening, watching, and observing.”
Ghadery selects a concise offering of seven poems, two of which are in multiple parts, themed around the delicate interconnections and reverberating moments within a web of familial relationships. The endnotes indicate this is part of a larger project, so there is the promise of more to come—Ghadery has been tireless these past few years with the release of a memoir in 2021, a full-length poetry collection in 2023, a short-fiction collection in 2024, and a novel slated for publication in 2026. The poems in the blades of grass are dreaming are wistful and poignant, with the first-person speaker often seeming to be off to the side in some way, listening, watching, and observing. We get snippets of conversation with a friend, a father, and a son; we’re given glancing insight into wider-ranging connections with extended family and acquaintances.
Mortality intrudes into the web, in the form of individual passage and also as rumoured or historical political violence. As the speaker asserts in the poem “I’m not supposed to be talking about this”, “… everything is fine / people are living their lives no blood in the streets no executions at dawn / your cousin goes to school sees friends as she pleases doesn’t live in fear …”.
Ghadery makes use of repetition as a device to reinforce stability in the face of threat. For example, the word “that” is repeated four times on its own line in “Remembrance Day 2024”, and the word “though” is used to introduce each of the three short stanzas of “The boy who asked me to the prom is d3@d”. We see subtler versions of this across the poems, as in the opening piece where the word “say” recurs four times and is echoed by the sound-similar “sigh” and the rhyme of “okay”, stitching a consistent thread through a poem that looks visually scattered on the page. Such deliberate choices work to develop balance, cohesion and tension in a small space. The collection feels bright and spare, but carries concealed weight.
A title like the blades of grass are dreaming inevitably evokes Walt Whitman, and while this is not the Whitman of the exuberant long line spilling across the vastness of the North American continent, it is perhaps in the lineage of the Whitman who in the opening stanza of his well-known poem “I Sing the Body Electric” pronounces, “The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, / They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them …”. The selections Ghadery has chosen to share are indeed poems of response, and, in the broadest sense, poems of love.
About the Author
Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land.
About the Reviewer
Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.
Book Details
Chapbook
100 Copies
ISBN - 978-1-988744-60-9
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Thank you for this lovely and thoughtful review, Dawn and TSR!