Words of surprise from Toronto, proud lyrics of NewfoundlandThe Chronicle HeraldSeptember 11, 2007
George Elliott Clarke
ELANA WOLFF is a Toronto poet and winner of the 2004 Lichen Magazine Tracking a Serial Poet Contest. You Speak to Me in Trees (Guernica, $15) is her third verse outing.
Newfoundland poet Agnes Walsh is the inaugural St. John’s Poet laureate. Her second collection, Going Around with Bachelors (Brick, $21), includes a CD of some of the book’s poems, recited by the author [...]
Agnes Walsh means to map Newfoundland, its speech and cultures, in proud lyrics that sound like stories: "The sun was all cultures, in proud lyrics that sound like stories : "The sun was all hallelujah and gave the grass that warm, green smell . . . / I looked at the clouds moving / fast in the sky above and felt that shiver of life / when it holds you and shakes you between not knowing / and knowing something . . . " Really, the poems are overlooked monologues: "that night your sister came round / to my back door with the November wind . . . / and her talking through her hair to me, // . . . and she was telling me to come to you . . . / you had your mother a prisoner of fright in her own home . . . // And Jesus, I swore then, / I’ll never go around with another bachelor."
To read the rest of this review, please click here.
*************
In the Old Country of My Heart, Agnes Walsh's first book of poems, is available as an unabridged audio recording, read by Agnes Walsh with unaccompanied ballads by Simone Savard-Walsh and pump organ music by George Morgan, from Rattling Books.
