‘Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE – Poems of Beauty & Anger’ A Review by Joseph Ross

Pamela Uschuk is, in my view, one of our country’s best poets. Her new book, REFUGEE, shows precisely why. Her poems rise up from careful craft, scattering beauty, detailed descriptions, merged with an anger at injustice and a persistent hope for the world that we could create. Her insistence, that her poems are not just pretty and tasty, puts her in the wide and necessary tradition of American poetry that cannot be silent in the face of human cruelty, America not living up to its own words. Pamela Uschuk’s words, in these poems, share delight at the natural world, at the same time as she laments and “borders on anger” at what we do to one another.