Dalton and Szymborska

Lynn Davies responds to one of Mary Dalton's poems, reprinted in The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry:

Her poem “The Boat” reminds me of Wistawa Szymborska’s "Funeral” in which Szymborska simply lists the comments of people attending a funeral. I can’t help smiling at the end. How pragmatic but vulnerable we are around death. In “The Boat”, Dalton describes the broken boat that sails down from the heavens and lands in a bed of petunias, and then she lists the people trying to use or make sense of the miraculous boat. In the “ballyhoo” at the end, as the people are arguing among themselves, the boat simply takes off into the blue again, “battered planks clanking.” It’s a noisier, more colourful poem, but I hear a similar vulnerability and pragmatism in response to mystery. Dalton makes me laugh here, as she often does in her poems.

Mary-Begot

In a major essay on her work, Fraser Sutherland celebrates Mary Dalton's use of a certain crystalline mineral:

"Given the omnipresence and omnipotence of salt in the history and geography of Newfoundland, it’s hardly surprising... that it has such prominence in the work of a poet so grounded in particulars as Mary Dalton. Adjectivally, it can also characterize her poems: they are salty. They are also saucy: impudent, bold, full of life. They take the idiom Dalton shares with her fellow Newfoundlanders, tempers it with her wide study of world poetry, and turns it to her own ends."