Governor General's Award-winner Richard Greene's remarkable new collection, Cannibal Rats, is rich with searing wisdom, complicated grace, and magisterial craft. Greene's peripatetic speakers report from locations as far-ranging as the Civil War battlefields of the American South and the storm-worn shores of Newfoundland, "where, as almost nowhere else, you can hold / in hand the inner substance of the world." In resonant meter and rhyme, Greene bears witness to historical injustices, meditates on how "art and memory unravel" under the auspices of time and mortality, and wrestles with the loss of a beloved mother and a recent cancer diagnosis. "[T]here's a limit to what the heart can learn / without pause and repair," writes Greene in the stunning travelogue that ends the book, "but I should return / to this place of bayonets and canon, / small gesture of one still living to what is gone." Cannibal Rats is a major accomplishment from one of Canada's most accomplished poets.