It's not often I choose to read a book of poetry; I suspect the same is true of you. But, ROAD MAPS by Margaret Westlie is poetry you won't want to miss. Her title comes from her opening poem, "Self," her poetry being a guide to her "inner me." Others poems provide additional glimpses into how she feels about herself and hints as to how her life has unfolded. Her experiences often provide a universal glimpse as well. She skillfully interprets herself in short, unrhymed verses and, occasionally, in prose. The reader learns of temptations, feelings of separateness and friendship, sibling rivalry, disintegrating marriage, death of a parent, reincarnation, and the destructiveness of war--a wide and interesting variety. Poetic devices abound and are often quirky and apt, as when she compares her mind to a cocklebur, cliches to potatoes, words to acrobats leaping "from neuron to neuron," a friend to a buried treasure or confidence to water in a radiator. This work holds numberous references to her native Canada. The reader is pulled into her sense of place. We can see "lingering light on a winter evening"or an owl searching for its supper; we can hear church bells competing with cow bells, we feel the cool breese or the "silence of the sarkening year; we taste "lumpy oatmeal porridge." Give this book a try and, perhaps, select one of her Haunted PEI novels as well.