Far too many poetry books in this country get far too little ink, but what can you legitimately expect of someone who reviews your book? A broad understanding of your past work or the tradition out of which you write? Rigorous, uncompromising standards minus the critical take down? And how technical should a review be? This week I talked to six editors from St. John's to Victoria about what they’re looking for in a poetry reviewer. Their answers might surprise you.

It’s unquestionably the most exciting moment of a poet’s life: tearing open the package or box from the publisher and glimpsing for the first time the cover of their latest collection of poems. A close second is opening up the literary journal that has set space aside for a careful evaluation of that collection, after which that mild trembling in your hands as you begin to read transforms into quiet, satisfied calm or white knuckled fury. How could the reviewer get it so wrong? you ask yourself. Or what a wonderfully smart and insightful human being.

“I really enjoy a reviewer who’s intelligently engaged,” says Arc editor Shane Rhodes, "even if they’re not agreeing with what you’re doing.” “I expect a reviewer to read a book with an open mind,” says The Malahat Review’s John Barton, “using all their experiences as readers to engage with the book and in a sense give a transcription of their impressions.” Clarise Foster at CV2 looks for “something that opens the work up. If it shuts down a less experienced reader then I’m not necessarily interested in it.” The poet’s sensitivities, adds Barton, are not the first consideration.

“My first job is to serve the needs of the reader before anything else. (The reviewer) should give a fair impression of what the book is about and how well the author has achieved his or her objectives in writing the book.”

All of which presupposes a fair attempt by the reviewer to understand what those objectives are. It means reading all the poems in a book, not just the few carefully positioned blockbusters at the front, and asking if the poems are of a consistent quality. It also means asking if the book has an overarching thrust or perspective? Does it gain steam and generate interest as you move from poem to poem or do awkward shifts in tone or point of view slow its momentum and deflate your interest?

OH TO BE INSANELY INTELLIGENT

British critic Ian Hamilton once wrote that reviews are “mostly written by people who think they are easy to do.” Plainly they’re not and not just because converting one’s subjective responses into readable prose can be a strain on heart and brain. Sometimes sheer labour is required as one trundles off to the library to read the poet’s past work or provide context for the book by re-visiting the tradition out of which that poet writes. Reading the book under scrutiny is not always enough for the reviewer who wants to do a good job.

“More and more I’m gravitating towards reviews that are actually idea-engaged or looking more broadly at a poet’s production or something a little bit larger than an individual book,” says Rhodes.

Heidi Harms at Prairie Fire says seasoned writers often help readers understand the history and poetics underpinning a new book of poems, but reminds us context is good “only as long as it doesn’t take up half the review. If that takes up a quarter of the review then I’ll really pare that back.” Adds Clarise Foster “Sometimes you get people who are all about context because it shows how smart they are. You have people who provide so much context that there’s no review,” she chuckles. Sometimes there’s not enough room to discuss the context, but Arc’s Katia Grubisic says even this needn’t be an issue. She cites one reviewer who in 500 words did “a tremendous job” on a book by John Steffler “providing background and explaining Steffler’s approach by citing a few poems.”

“And so you read something like that and you lose patience with the rest of the crap. You think `This can be done, it should be done, what is wrong with the rest of you?”

The central challenge, says Mark Callanan at Canadian Notes & Queries, is to find reviewers knowledgeable about the various traditions of poetry and who bring a broad cultural perspective to the book at hand.

“Poetry doesn’t just draw on poetry, it draws on the entire realm of human experience, including philosophy and history and science. And so your ideal critic is someone who is insanely intelligent and also indiscriminately interested in not even just reading but popular culture. Their frame of reference has to be as wide as you can imagine.”

A SENSE OF STYLE

“Stylistically speaking, reviewing is not just an exercise in spewing facts or disjointed observations,” says Callanan. “It’s an exercise in writing. I don’t know that I’d call it an art form, but it is certainly artful.”

We all can remember a favourite teacher at school, but some of us will recall a critic who opened us up to the brilliance of other writers and did it while writing extraordinary well themselves, with dash and colour, unfolding idea after idea despite the sometimes limited space available. Good writers hold up great writers as models for their own style, occasionally heart broken knowing that something more than endless hours spent in the library is necessary before it can be acquired. And so it is with reviewing.

Developing a style all one’s own sometimes runs up against an opposite impulse, to borrow from another’s style, or worse, fall back on culturally sanctioned tropes or clichés that are seldom more than vague approximations of the truth about a book of poems. In a recent issue of a Canadian literary magazine, for example, three successive poetry reviews used “meditative” to describe the poem or poet. And while we can only hope this particular word is soon consigned to the literary dustbin, editors routinely encounter their own cringe inducing “mal mots”. For Katia Grubisic it’s “readable”, a word she suspects is code for “accessible”, (a perfectly good word that has fallen on hard times recently). “For a while `nuanced’ or `edgy’ seemed to be everywhere,” says Heidi Harms. Ditto the word “accomplished”, says John Barton.

“I’m not too fond of qualifying adjectives. I want the proof. Sometime I think people write reviews almost as if they’re anticipating them as pull quotes.”

IS THERE A PLACE FOR THE CRITICAL TAKE DOWN?

Some of the most memorable styles are synonymous with extraordinary negativity. Dorothy Parker’s dismissal of a young Kate Hepburn performance as “running the gamut of emotions from A to B” stands out for both its concision and flourish. Francis Jeffrey’s response to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads “This will never do” and Martin Amis’s skewering of Robert Bly’s Iron John (“in he comes, preceded by a gust of testosterone and a few tumbleweeds of pubic hair”) are great examples of condensed hostility and derision enlisted in the service of the reading public. Selling the negative requires that the reviewer or critic do so with both panache and unerring accuracy. Even a negative review of a book or poet you love can be rescued through force of style and an unflinching regard for the truth.

But a full force critical take down - executed to salve a personal wound or to burnish one’s own reputation at the expense of an icon – is just not on for most editors, including Heidi Harms. “Certainly not. Certainly not…critical yes, but not a trashing.” “Not at Event,” says Sue Wasserman. ““I say to reviewers if there isn’t something about it that you want to say that would be positive and nurturing then let’s give you a different book.” These editors argue that by going too negative you draw attention away from the work under review and risk losing your readers’ attention for future reviews. Simply put, you’re no longer taken seriously.

But are there no circumstances under which a thoroughly bad book of poems calls out for a thorough thrashing? Mark Callanan and John Barton believe there are, but even these come with caveats. “If someone wants to take issue with an author’s skills and they can do it in a plausible way I’m fine with it," says Barton. "But I don’t want them mixing in word flourishes to somehow underscore their point or come up with some dry witticism that has a little extra sting in it, I don’t believe in that.” Callanan is more open to the critical take down of poetic reputations inflated beyond their merits.

“There are poets who have enjoyed great success critically; they’ve been widely acclaimed for little or no reason. Canada and Canadian poetry have progressed to a point that we can take a long sober look at ourselves and say `You know what? We don’t have to applaud every little effort that’s made on behalf of poetry. We can actually be selective.’”

Such selectivity might extend to reviews, particularly those written by the reviewer who never met a book of poetry he didn’t like. A more immediate question facing editors is how to address these kinds of reviews when they cross their desks. How do you say “This will never do.” Because between the time you’ve allocated space for the review and have it in hand it may be too late to ask for significant changes - or find another reviewer. Barton’s hope is that “some of that can be removed at the outset in how we match reviewers with books or how books are passed on to reviewers.”

A sure sign that a reviewer really doesn’t like a book of poetry – despite their protestations to the contrary – is their refusal to discuss it. The poet being reviewed may settle for the broadest generalities about their work but the reader shouldn’t. Instead we look for a generous sampling from the poems themselves and some effort to unpack the effect which these have on the reader. If the poem leaves the reader cold then the reviewer should try to explain why this might be the case - by closely examining the thematic shape of the poem, the juxtaposition of images, how rhythm and line endings support or fail to support a poem's meaning. Understanding how these work helps us to better understand and appreciate others poems we come across.

Of course there’s always a chance reviewers will demonstrate their ignorance outright by discussing a book too closely, but that’s their problem, not ours. At some point the veracity of the review rises or falls on the evidence it supplies. Susan Wasserman says we’re not about to return to the close read which characterized the New Criticism of the 50s and 60s. We are, however, obliged to attend to things like end-rhyme and image, parsing syntax and rhythm a little to show why something works or does not work. “I don’t think the whole review should do that, but absolutely, look at the language and the way things are laid out on the page.”

Shane Rhodes says a close read is useful if it supports a larger argument about the poet’s style “giving some good examples of that or looking at something that seems to be tearing a book apart.” But problems also occur when a review is too focused on the technical.

“It can get a little too detailed, whereas a review often requires much broader strokes and a reviewer who looks at some of the general ideas that the book might be investigating.”

Review: Bruce Taylor's "No End in Strangeness"

Ear-catching rhythms, wonderful acoustic properties and images are all there as Mathew Henderson and I team up in this review of Bruce Taylor's latest...

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"The Ugly"

A beautiful poem, by John Glenday.

Layers

Yes, we’re back, and for a second week. For sympathetic readers mildly curious about what deep dark hole we disappeared into, it will come as no surprise to hear that poetry blogs are as vulnerable to the exigencies of time and cash as magazines and small presses. We pick up where we left off, with a few changes which I’ll describe below.

Last week, I introduced a great poem by Dutch poet Hester Knibbe entitled “Last Night”. I love how Knibbe handles colour and tone in that poem. My neighbour and poet George Payerle was struck by the lyric poem, too (reminding him, he said, of the German poet Gottfried Benn). Here’s a second offering by Hester, followed by our interview.

Thetis’ Heel

Even gods, though they were born

in our own heads, died out to myth.

Just as no one can point to the source

of the spring or later at sea can say: this

is the water from deep in the earth, that

flowed from the mountaintops, so

is the stream of mortals and gods.

About my origins I know

nothing. I married the earth, a child

grew in me, fell

out of me at last, and I

babbled: little mutt of mine, I’ll

name you, dunk you in invulnerability.

He smiled at me, held me tightly

by the heel and said mama.

Translated By Jacquelyn Pope

DG: What I take from this poem is that our preoccupation with origins is undercut by the impermanence of history and the shift in how we comprehend reality. Is that what you intended? Does it not also address concerns about male and female knowledge, e.g. Thetis’ “knowing nothing” and that sly inversion by Achilles when he dips his mother Thetis into the River Styx?

HK: In the old ‘story’ Achilles’ mother Thetis married Peleus, a mortal, and as a result her son also becomes mortal. So that Achilles, the fighting boy and hero, can become immortal Thetis dips him into the Styx. Why is Thetis doing this? Because her kid is her vulnerability, I think. And so I also read in that story the vulnerability of all mothers. No, Achilles didn’t dip her into the Styx, he only touched her and said ‘mamma’. And with that ‘mamma’ she was doomed to live in fear for him.

I like it to see old stories and myths from other positions. In the original story Thetis has only a sort of small supporting role; in this poem I give her the leading part.

As for your questions about origins the gods exist by the grace of the existence of human beings. And we don’t know or have memories about where we were before life on earth and where we will be after life, if we were or will be.

DG: In poems such as “The Archaeologist” and "Light Years” you seem to invest hope in our capacity to grasp meaning and beauty from the things of the past and the stars overhead, only to have this undercut by an abiding skepticism.

HK: It’s more an observation of patterns. Things are what they are, neither more nor less. There is a strong order in nature and that order is disturbed by chaos. In my poems I try to restore the order, to discover a certain pattern, even in chaos. There is no good or evil in nature, no justice or injustice. These are only good tools for the livability of a community.

As for skepticism, that’s not my intention. I am always astonished that the feelings of people nowadays are so much like those of the people who lived more than two thousand years ago. That is the reason we can understand the old plays: it’s all about emotions that we still have and can see in our own environments, feel in our own body. I am curious about those things, about what people have in common, not bound by place or time.

DG: Am I wrong in seeing some influence of Philip Larkin in your poetry? Who are your favourite American and British poets?

HK: My (deceased) colleague, Jan Eijkelboom, a marvelous translator from English into Dutch, has translated a lot of the beautiful poems of Philip Larkin. But my favorites are T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. I used two lines from Eliot’s Four Quartets for my poetry: “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where/And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time”. And:

“The end is where we start from”. These are also themes in ‘Thetis’ heel’.

For my new collection, ‘Het hebben van schaduw’ (Having shadow’), I use a sentence from Auden in his poem ‘For the time being’: ‘We who must die demand a miracle.’

DG: How much confidence do you have in language to convey fixed or inviolable meaning? I ask because of what I perceive to be the “doubleness” in your use of words and syntax, e.g. the opening line in “The Archaeologist”, which can be read two or three different ways: “In one who doesn’t speak the story petrifies/gets stumbled over, causes hurt. Then/says the man who should know about the past, then/is a word you need to learn now…”

Are you not in some sense using the variability or instability of language to deconstruct meaning, if only in a playful way?

HK: One of the things that makes poetry is what I call “layer-language”, i.e. language with different meanings, like layers in a layer-cake. Every layer has its own taste. Without that, poetry becomes a simple announcement. It’s what accounts for the ‘doubleness’ in my syntax and use of words. In Dutch there are a lot of ways to ’play’ or ‘work’ in language, to give several meanings to a word and make a sentence interpretable in different ways. In “The Archaeologist”, for example, the last word is ‘vanishing point’. In painting it is the point at which all lines come together. But it is of course also the point at which everyone will vanish. In the poem it is the altar that must save us from vanishing forever.

Sometimes I suddenly see the old beauty of a word. In the last sentence of the poem ‘Persephone’ the Dutch word is ‘verbruid’. It comes from the verb ‘verbruien’ which means ‘to be through with’, but in it is also the word ‘bruid’ which means ‘bride’. In the context of the poem it is a marvelous extra.

In another of my poems I use the words ‘huidige tijd’ which means ‘now’ or ‘this time’. But in Dutch we have the word ‘huid’ which means ‘skin’. So you can say the time now is our skin time. That is the beauty of language, which I am afraid can also lead to difficulty in translation. Of course you can say it is a sort of deconstruction of meanings. But it is also a way to build new meanings and a way of restoring language to its original.

DG: Your language is also spare and rather compressed. Is this a conscious choice or is something more unconscious and serendipitous at work here?

HK: This is often considered to be my idiom. When writing I use language both consciously and unconsciously. It has to do with rhythm, the music of the poem. I often sense that the poem selects its own construction and music. So when I write, I am listening to what the poem wants. After years of practice I have tended more and more to write down what I hear. Afterwards I make the necessary corrections.

DG: That’s an interesting word to use: “corrections”. Are you saying that the unconscious has made an error in some fashion that must be fixed?

HK: When a carpenter has made a chair, he will sand and polish it to make it a good and useful one. A poet has to do the same.

DG: What I love about your work is your ability, sometimes in the same poem, to shift from enormous delicacy (as in “Glasswork”) to a kind of abrasive roughness (e.g. “Hungerpots”). Do you see reality or the world in this way, i.e. as a place where beauty and ugliness collide and sometimes even cooperate?

HK: Yes, I do. It’s also a matter of listening, of conscious and unconscious. I let it happen.

DG: You write about romantic love in your poems, but again without a sense of love’s reality or its capacity to endure (a perennial theme, to be sure, in classical poetry). Is romantic love, as we understand it in the classical tradition, possible in contemporary poetry? Or has our experience and understanding of love changed too dramatically for this to occur?

HK: In the classical tradition poets have also written about love to die for, physical love and all kinds of love sorrow. In the Middle Ages there was courtly poetry and burlesque poetry. In that sense it is the same as in contemporary poetry. I don’t think that our understanding of love really has changed. As in the past we have the ‘eternal’ love, the one-night stand and all that is between the two. That is the reason that we can understand so completely the classic plays, the old myths. Good poetry is timeless. Nowadays, too, we can say and write things with universal and timeless value.

DG: One of the best poems I’ve read in a long while is one we featured last week “Last Night” in which the speaker “saves” two children. Readers may differ over whether the crisis in the poem is set within a dream or the imagination, but what is more intriguing to me is the emotional pitch of the poem (i.e. matter-of-fact, detached) and what it seems to say about consciousness (i.e. that we have choices in how we view and interpret the world). Are you speaking to a larger responsibility here than simply executing a well-wrought poem?

HK: It’s only rarely that I write a poem only to create something that is ‘well-wrought’ or what we call “l’art pour l’art”. When I write I am trying to express something. But it’s striking that you should mention this poem! The theme of it is also the mother’s fear about losing her children, an attempt to save them from death. I wrote the poem years before “Thetis’ heel” and a lot has happened meantime. But there it is again: the vulnerability of a mother.

DG: A technical question: many poets enjamb their lines, but not always very successfully. Your enjambments, by contrast, really do seem to contribute to the sense of the line and to the rationale underpinning your stanza breaks. Any tips here for other poets on how you approach lineation and enjambment?

HK: It’s to the credit of my translator Jacquelyn Pope, who has saved many of them. I try to say something extra with an enjambment, for example, that a hesitation between yes and no in the 8th and 9th lines of "Thetis' Heel":

About my origins I know

nothing. I married the earth, a child

With that enjambment I express my doubt and say: ‘yes, I know about my origins’ and ‘no, I know nothing about my origins’. I advise every poet to explore those sorts of possibilities in the arrangement of their words and look for others. In that way you can give more depth to a poem.

DG: I understand you’re working on a book of poems to be published in English. Can you tell us a little about that project?

HK: I should like to have a selection in English and I hope to realize it in cooperation with Jacquelyn Pope, who translates my poems so well. My favorite translation of my work by her is an edition in two languages with the Dutch version on one page and on the opposite page the translation in English. That way the reader can see the original text, and have an idea of the sound, the length, the enjambments, etc.

Until now it was up to Jacquelyn Pope to choose the poems, but perhaps we’ll agree later about which poems she will translate. For me it is difficult to assess the problems she has to address within a translation.

DG: Finally, a question for translator Jacquelyn Pope. Any translation will suffer from the limitations that naturally arise when words from different languages attempt to describe the same or similar experience, a difficulty compounded by the idiomatic nature of language. What are some of the things you tried to keep in mind while translating Hester Knibbe’s poetry?

JP: Translation always involves compromise, and sometimes the nature of the compromise changes as you are working on a particular piece. Dutch is a much more compressed language than English, and that poses challenges to begin with. Hester’s work has lots of echoes for Dutch readers, even between single words, that can’t be replicated in English because, for example, a particular similarity in sound or spelling simply doesn’t exist. On the other hand, English allows pretty generous syntactical freedom, and that is tremendously important in translating poems. In virtually any translation there are always words, phrases or references that are difficult to convey out of their particular cultural context, but I try to put my awareness of these aside, since what I want to concentrate on are the parts of the poem that can come in to their own in English, and after several rounds of revision it usually becomes clear whether or not a particular poem is going to be viable.

In translating Hester’s work I try to pay particular attention to the architecture of the poem and to reflecting its sounds, colors and echoes, as these are the factors that establish that elusive quality of tone, the thing that really draws me to a poem in the first place, and certainly the thing that first drew me to her work.

Hester Knibbe made her literary debut in 1982 with "Tussen gebaren en woorden", which was followed by another ten collection of poems. Her work has been awarded inter alia the Herman Gorter Prize, the Anna Blaman Prize and the A. Roland Holst Prize. Hester Knibbe has appeared at various poetry festivals, with her work appearing in several literary magazines. Her poems have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Turkish and Hebrew. Between 2008 and 2010 she was the chair of PEN Nederland..

Recent publications:

De buigzaamheid van steen (The Flexibility of Stone), 2005

Bedrieglijke dagen (Deceitful Days), 2008

Oogsteen (Eye Stone), (selected poems 1982-2008), 2009

Het hebben van schaduw (Having Shadow), 2011

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I hope you’re going to see something a little different at Speaking of Poems from now on. First, less commentary and a stronger commitment to reviewing, if for no other reason than reviews are in short supply in this country. That means one full length review on the last Saturday of each month, i.e. twelve reviews each year, with the occasional poet interview. Second, some blogs will be devoted to poets from countries besides Canada. Convinced that we all fare better, and our national literature grows stronger when we drink in more of the world around us I’ll introduce poets you might not be familiar with, but who I think you’ll really enjoy.

First up in late June: a review of Don Coles’ Where We Might Have Been - short-listed for The Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry (winner TBA June 23^rd).

Casting our net wide....

Hester Knibbe has enjoyed increasing attention from European and American readers as the author of two books of poems in her native Dutch: Oogsteen (2009) and Bedrieglijke dagen (2008), both from De Arbeiderspers. Rather than wait for her first book of poems in English, I thought I’d offer a taste in the translated poem below, a wonderful achievement in 12 lines. Next week, I’ll follow up with an interview with Hester and her translator, Jacquelyn Pope.

Last Night

Saved two children last night.

They lay under thin black ice

one gone blue, the other grey.

I laid them out on grass

that snapped under my step

wrung their bodies warm and dry

gave them the gust of my breath.

Then I looked out at the morning

that lay lukewarm on the water

put on a tank top

arranged some grasses in a vase

fished two children out of sleep.

Hester Knibbe

(Translated by Jacquelyn Pope)

Lifelines

The conventional take on poets is that their principal enterprise is to trade in personal feeling, something that took on a deeper, some would say too close and lugubrious cast in the poetry that followed Lowell and Bishop. This week I asked Toronto poet Catherine Graham about the personal pitch she strikes in a poem about her father.

The Watch

Six foot three, basking in tawny heat,
sunk in his lounger, spring to September.
His face bakes like earth.
Chest hairs slice the sweat beads.
The black leather watch (he never forgot
to unstrap) ticks beside his ghetto blaster.
Cobalt eyes, silver thick hair, dentured smile,
arms folded under the crest of his chest,
he poses for fall's final mould.

*

Later, after the black skid, spin and deep
tip of the freshly polished blue Caddy;
after the crunch of skull on the dashboard;
even after the front page photo and headline:
my father's watch, still ticking,
unzipped from the O.P.P.'s plastic.
No cracks, glass smooth to touch.
Dry mud flakes sprinkle like ashes
on to my opening hand.

The poem is obviously a very personal poem, which raises the question: How personal should our poems be? Can you talk a little about what the process was like for you writing this poem?

“The Watch” was originally two poems about my father. I was living in Northern Ireland at the time, completing an MA in creative writing in poetry, when I realized the two poems were stronger as one: “watch” as verb and “watch” as noun. The “I” in the poem, the daughter, is watching her father sunbathe. The pose of a sunbather is the pose of death, the coffin stance, arms folded under the crest of his chest, / he poses for fall’s final mould. And his face bakes like earth is the body, the flesh and blood, returning to earth, the elements. And yet this body is very much alive, producing water –sweat –as opposed to a dead body, a stiff dry corpse. I wanted certain details to bring this resting image to life— chest hairs slice the sweat beads— a somewhat violent image (though understated) to hint/connect to the poem’s foreboding nature.

My father loved to suntan and worked hard to get the “George Hamilton” look. He was virtually guaranteed this look as he used QT (Quick Tan) to become a bronze Adonis. Yet my father wasn’t six foot three. He was six foot six. But in my mind six foot three, basking in tawny heat made for a stronger lyrical line than six foot six, basking in tawny heat so sound overruled fact.

The detail “dentured smile” is based on fact. I’ve since discovered this particular word often leads readers to believe that the father in “The Watch” is a much older man, more like a grandfather. My father was fifty seven when he died. He didn’t have his teeth anymore and hadn’t since his mid-twenties. Not until I shared this poem with high school students in Northern Ireland did I realize how this would affect the reading of the poem, connecting the image to a much older man.

The asterisk works as a bridge between then and now, before and after –what death does—and like the chest hairs slicing the sweat beads there’s no going back.
My father died in a late night car accident the last year of my undergraduate degree at McMaster University. His “polished blue Caddy” swerved and tipped and landed in the ditch while I was in bed fast asleep, home for the weekend. A three a.m. knock on my bedroom door became the sound that would change my life. I opened that door and the police officer standing there told me what had happened.

A few days later that same police officer returned to our house with a Ziploc bag. It contained my father’s watch. I couldn’t believe it was still ticking. I remember thinking of that Timex commercial – it takes a licking but keeps on ticking – so I guess my grieving mind had room for black humour.

How personal should poems be? I don’t think “should” has to come into it. Every poet has their own unique journey – what they write, why they write, how they write. In my case, death served as a catalyst to the creative life. I’d recently lost my mother. She died of cancer on Christmas Day during my first year as an undergraduate at McMaster University, so my grieving doubled when my father died.

I was not a child who grew up knowing she wanted to be a writer. A therapist I was seeing after my father’s death suggested I keep a journal to help me deal with the overwhelming grief. I started to write about my life, my parents’ lives, my feelings, and this journal writing gradually turned into little poems. After making this profound connection –yes, you are writing poems – I haven’t stopped writing poetry, reading poetry, teaching poetry. Poetry is my lifeline.

As mentioned earlier, this poem was written in Northern Ireland. Writing about loss and grief in another country, one far away from the familiars of home, helped free my creativity. Time away in a new place distilled memory and emotion enabling me to craft personal poems like “The Watch” which ends: Dry mud-flakes sprinkle like ashes / onto my opening hand, that “opening hand” the small hope of promise.

This poem, like others you’ve written, unfolds in a spare, almost perfunctory or phlegmatic manner. Is this a deliberate strategy on your part, i.e. as a way of withholding information from the reader? If that is so, why?

Many years ago I took a writing course with Barbara Gowdy at the University Of Toronto School Of Continuing Studies where I now teach. One of the things Barbara said that has stuck with me through the years was that your subject matter chooses you. I think this is also true of style. Your style chooses you—your word rhythms and word choices and line lengths. What feels right? What doesn’t feel right? All choices, intuitive or deliberate, help a writer find and connect with their unique voice.

I’m quiet by nature like my mother (my father was the talker in the family) and like my mother I enjoy listening. I’m comfortable with silence and love to spend time on my own. Perhaps this is the result of growing up as an only child. Using spare language doesn’t feel like a deliberate strategy, it feels like home to me.

The “almost perfunctory or phlegmatic manner” you make note of in my work is, upon reflection, a way of avoiding sentimentality. I don’t think I realized this at the time of writing these first poems— poems about a daughter’s attempts to come to terms with the deaths of both parents – which then became the poems in my first collection The Watch (published in Northern Ireland) and Pupa here in Canada. Incidentally Pupa is also the beginning of a trilogy. In addition to Pupa there’s The Red Element and most recently Winterkill, all published with Insomniac Press.

I remember reading a great quote by Chekhov: The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make. By giving the cold hard facts you let the reader decide how to “feel”. A bit like the classic creative-writing nugget “show, don’t tell”. There’s great power in this advice, I think, especially when the subject matter – death/grief– is so loaded with emotion.

You mention withholding information. Again I believe less is more. As a reader I’m comfortable with filling in the spaces left by the writer, becoming involved with the white space of the text, so I guess it makes sense that I would do this as a writer. I enjoy ambiguity and playing around with “what if”.

Who are your principal influences? Am I wrong in hearing Emily Dickinson’s influence on your poems, in particular your selection of images, rhythm etc.?

I’m wary of the word “influences”. I think the best way to answer this question is to share some of my reading journey while I was living in Northern Ireland and writing my first poems. Such poets included Northern Irish poets like Heaney, MacNeice and Muldoon and Irish poets like Yeats and Kavanagh. UK poets too –Hughes, Duffy and Selima Hill, plus European poets living in America like Brodsky and Milosz. American poets included Frost, Plath, Stevens, Bishop and yes, Dickinson. I love the miniature aspect of her work for I loved miniatures as a child – tiny dolls and doll houses, little figurines. For awhile I even collected miniature furniture. Tiny things appeal to me so I guess that’s part of my poetic aesthetic which is why Dickinson also appeals. And her love of nature, for I too love the outdoors and grew up beside a water-filled limestone quarry, kind of like a big blue secret as most of the locals didn’t even know it was there, a little lake hidden from view in the woods.

I lost the quarry when I lost my parents, but like an underground spring the quarry has fed my imagination. It’s part of each book in the Insomniac trilogy.

Now the quarry is my imagination. Paul Vermeersch, poetry editor of Insomniac Press, recently pointed this out to me. A comforting thought that the quarry lives inside me. I thank Paul for this healing insight.

Catherine Graham is the author of four poetry collections: The Watch, Pupa, The Red Element and Winterkill. Vice President of Project Bookmark Canada and Marketing Coordinator for the Rowers Pub Reading Series, she teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her work has appeared in such literary journals as The New Quarterly, Descant, The Fiddlehead, The Literary Review of Canada, Web del Sol, Poetry Ireland Review, anthologized in The White Page / An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets and showcased in Poetry is Public is Poetry and Nuit Blanche Words Travel Fast. www.catherinegraham.com