No Ordinary Days is a book of shifting perspectives. It begins with a sense of limited beautiful days and a series of elegies for friends alive in memory but vanished into the stream of time. It opens into a consideration of some of the heroism, tragedy and terror in our age and briefly looks forward to a time beyond capitalism. The poems then turn to the personal as the poet experiences disruption in her own damaged home, her temporary homelessness, and her renewed appreciation of home. Framing these poems about the uniqueness of days and the change of one age to the next are poems about the immensity beyond the earthly realm, the vastness of the stars.

Elizabeth Greene’s writing rests on quiet self-confidence and long-earned wisdom. Well-polished and eminently friendly, the sixty-eight poems in No Ordinary Days emanate rare connective strength. In bringing her craft, insight, and deep appreciation for what matters in life—family and friendship, longings and loves, the embrace of nature, creativity, the “imaginative realms,” and “common good”—Greene provides keen and consoling poetic companionship. She reminds us that “time is round,” that there is “No light without dark / No sure without doubt”; affirms that “sometimes only the physical world will do,” that in “uncertainty, / a new age forms,” and counsels: “Always try magic first.” Greene’s poems crackle with a veritable magic, and warm us to awareness that there are indeed “no ordinary days.”
—Elana Wolff, author of Faithfully Seeking Franz

Poet and novelist Elizabeth Greene knows the world her poems move through—lake and forest trail, each named flower, each scent lingering in poems. But these are not only poems of the natural world, but also Kingston’s limestone buildings and the people who live within those walls. These poems are elegiac. They are a light breeze on the surface of a lake, they are about time, and what happens just off centre of stage, in the slant and liminal spaces. Read her for her elegiac stance, her writerly wisdom and her witnessing eye, which is a “taproot into limestone soil.”
—Yvonne Blomer, author of The Death of Persephone,
former Poet Laureate of Victoria

Elizabeth Greene’s No Ordinary Days is a poetic reminder that ordinary days are often extraordinary even in the simplest of moments. Whether grappling with our Anthropocene era (“Who Will Paint Our Age?”), sending one’s spirit across the veil for answers (“Charismatic Speech”) or capturing the elusive words for a poem (“Finding the Words”), Greene’s wide-ranging voice and vision are both incantatory and transcendent.
—Clara Blackwood, author of Pomegranate Heart