Like savouring the flavours of a fine wine or a hand-crafted cigar, Bill Howell’s new collection of poems, Porcupine Archery, provides readers with a luxurious assortment of images and thoughts. His intelligent and imaginative collection binds together warm and cold memories, piquant cultural observations and robust scenarios of growth and discovery.

The title poem “Porcupine Archery” crafts the early awakenings of a child’s realization of adult fallibility. When a teacher tries to explain that porcupines shoot their quills, the speaker, reminiscing as an adult, remembers this definitive moment and his response as the first act of defiance against his elders: “I’d asked if she’d ever seen this, fully prepared/ to describe my uncle’s bounding Labs forever getting their/snouts bashed by spiky tails.” In eloquent and pungent verse, a line like this energizes the poem with a climactic and definitive moment to the growth and critical awareness of a child. This poem helps to define the collection with a mature awareness of the pains concomitant with living in the world — both as the hurler and the victim of painful barbs.

“Dad’s Canoe,” with tight lines that loll in the ears and on the lips (“What laps/and lapses finally collapses”), brings a quaintness to the almost always tarnished memories of parents. “Calling it in, Regent Park” is a dark description of witnessing a homicide. “Late Show” powerfully renders the sneaking home of an adulterer and “The Interface” is a harnessed description of a moment of communion with nature.

“When I Want To” is written first from the perspective of two new cat owners, then from the cat. The transition between the two perspectives is too quick — the reader has to pause (no pun intended) to catch up. The poem doesn’t have the necessary humour that makes this kind of anthropomorphism work, as in E.T.A. Hoffman’s classic The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr. “Local Traffic” is a valiant effort at uniting the egoistic speed of modern life — figuratively rendered by a traffic jam — and the halting pace of an elderly woman crossing the road, but there is little power in the emotive plea in the final stanza.

Porcupine Archery has a quiet strength in its verses, evidence of a seasoned and confident writer. Howell’s new collection is rich in potent imagery, re-imagined moments and urbane genuine sentiment.