It is a language festival, a lark, a goof-off of words. It is the love of saying....Hear this poetry. Dalton has a marvellous ear for speech, and every poem claims a hold on the ear....If your contact with Newfoundland is mostly with starchy Rex Murphy, I’d recommend a copy of
Merrybegot.
—Andrew Vaisius,
Prairie Fire
..a universal pleasure to read...tightly rhythmic poetic units, by turns pungently funny and moving.
—Jana Prikryl,
Quill and Quire
There’s a bluntness, a beauty and a bawdiness to their stories that reach out to the readers. One wants to invite Dalton’s characters over for tea and listen to them all night long.
—Jenny Higgins,
The Sunday Independent
Folksy, feisty, and possessing a rough irreverence, the poetry in
Merrybegot is grounded in both the speech rhythms and landscape of Dalton’s Atlantic home. [The poems show] pitch-perfect technique.
—Shane Neilson,
Books in Canada
...a real find...Dalton is sharp, insistent and dramatic.
—Thomas McCarthy,
The Irish Times
The best pure discovery [among the poets in the American anthology of contemporary Canadian poetry,
Open Field]—the most original poet whom almost no U.S. readers will know—comes from perhaps the least urban locale: the place is Lake View, Newfoundland, the poet Mary Dalton, whose spiky, dialect-strewn verse animates passionate fishermen, overworked wives, nearly pre-industrial hardships, and striking figures of speech.
—Stephen Burt,
The Yale Review
Merrybegot yields a series of brilliant-cut verbal surfaces...[the] lines speak for themselves far better than they can be spoken for. The best I can do is indicate the poignant imagery, sharp wit and effective concision of Dalton’s words....Poem after delightful poems follows...Perhaps most importantly, one has the sense of coming into contact with a living language, its cultural history strongly present alongside its cultural immediacy....Dalton’s craftsmanship is impeccable.
—Asa Boxer,
Books in Canada
...in their perlocution, their actual impact in the world of
Merrybegot, the “small monologues” are united in their performance of valuing the spoken word, and it is a great thing to see in Canada, where our speech is often deeply regional but glossed as provincial, in the pejorative sense of the word. Dalton’s spare lines make the case for the language’s eloquence.
—Tanis MacDonald,
The Malahat Review
Merrybegot’s language is fresh, sharp, musical, and loaded with meaning. At times the poems create the slightly hair-raising effect that you get when language performs in new and slightly unusual ways. How is it that they manage to have both a curatorial and experimental feel?
Ultimately these “small monologues” are true love poems to place. They will stand whatever time throws at them....
—Patrick Warner,
The Fiddlehead
These are fast poems. They slip by quickly, yet once gone, still hold hard to the ear and tongue. They’re a mix of curse and blessing, the poems feathered as clean as newborn swallows as they dip and weave in the winsome cadences and idioms of Newfoundland. They are like something overheard in the street or at a table in a bar just after it opens, short as a joke and deep as a charm. [These poems] lift us from the obviously crafted, intellectual poem to an art that echoes the best of William Butler Yeats’s late poems, where he gave up artifice for the simplicity of joy and beauty.
—Patrick Lane,
The Globe and Mail
This tight sequence of terse dramatic monologues in Newfoundland dialect is a remarkable piece of poetic compression. Besides being meditations on the idioms of Mary Dalton’s home province, these minimalist poems manage, with a few brushstrokes, to paint a complex picture of an outport community, with all its heavy weather, tightly knit co-operation, vicious gossip, love , misery, lust and bigotry. This is poetry that, in its unsentimental fidelity to local linguistic and social details, fashions a world readily apprehended by any mainlander.
—Zachariah Wells,
maisonneuve
Merrybegot has the potential to rattle the Canadian poetry scene down to its foundations. It is evidence that poetry can indulge in its own language and rhythms without compromising the sense of the writing or, more importantly, its deep connection to soul. I can say without reservation that this is the most important collection of poetry to come out of this island since the 1923 debut of Pratt’s Newfoundland Verse.
—Mark Callanan,
The Independent
These poems...harmonize a very personal voice with the ancient voice of a whole culture....[They are] rooted and sure.
—The Jury,
The TickleAce/Cabot Award
Mary Dalton’s poems are masterpieces of compression and musicality....there’s a sense this whole collection has something charmed about it. It’s a delight from cover to cover.
—Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star
Steering clear of sentimentality, [Dalton’s] love of place emerges not by way of romanticized exposition but through the crusty, irreverent monologues of the inhabitants themselves, their language distilled to its purest, most potent essence. [
Merrybegot is] the lively offspring of oral language and western text, a hybrid of rhythms that refuses to stray “too far from music.”
—Carolyn Marie Souaid,
The Montreal Gazette
In tackling the language and culture of Newfoundland, Mary Dalton has chosen a subject that has been equally the object of scorn and praise, condescension and romanticism.She expertly walks between these extremes like the salter in [her poem] “Burn 2.”...These poems are more quest than quaint, full of words and images the reader will never entirely unravel.
—Paul Chafe,
postscript
Mary Dalton’s
Merrybegot has the quality of an instant classic. The short emphatic poems that comprise the collection possess an assurance, a distinctive completeness, reminiscent of songs or tales honed for generations in the popular imagination. The energy stored in them is remarkable....To read them is to travel deep into the living and undiminished reality of Newfoundland
—The Jury,
The E. J. Pratt Poetry Award
The audiobook recording of Merrybegot is read by Anita Best accompanied by Patrick Boyle on trumpet et al.
A Canadian audiobook recording produced by Rattling Books in Newfoundland and Labrador.
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