Sea Sick

Chad Pelley is impressed with the metaphor-making in Sue Goyette's new collection of poems:

In Ocean, Sue wades in metaphoric reaction to a life lived by the sea. The ocean is an image-and subtext-rich thing on the margins of her everyday life, and she plays off this, fishing fantastic parallels between the ebb and flow of the Atlantic and life itself. But this is not run-of-the-mill poetry in which the poet uses the ocean to reflect on one’s life, or the world, or our place in it—Goyette plunges much deeper than that, both stylistically and conceptually. She’s making up her own metaphorical ocean mythology in these poems, and it makes for vibrant, innovative poetry.

Chad Campbell doesn't think she pulls it off:

“Everything is connected!”, Goyette’s speaker proclaims, and yes, it is: because a world has been created in which there are no boundaries between anything—not dreams, matter, smells, senses, concepts, or memories—and their connections aren’t revealed because they are presented as fact. Goyette doesn’t have to ground or hone her metaphors, to fashion cohesive conceits, because she has created this world with a structure that implicitly excuses their failings and obscurities.

Sample poem: "The ocean is the original mood ring"

Hooking: Review Round-Up

Jared Bland:

Mary Dalton’s Hooking (Signal) offers sophisticated centos—poems made entirely of lines from other poems—that make an eloquent argument for the idea that all poems exist in relation to other poetry

Jonathan Ball:

Dalton "hooks" these lines into her own patterns with true craft, to form powerful, evocative sentiments.

Chad Pelley:

This is truly, to my knowledge, an unprecedented work of poetry, and a great one at that.

Barbara Carey:

Dalton’s stitch work is very fine: it makes for some strange juxtapositions, but they are often as evocative as they are enigmatic. In effect, the collection as a whole is a celebration of creation, and subtly links writing to other products of human making, such as cloth, braids, lace, filaments and thread, all of which are mentioned in the poems. At their best, the strung-together lines and phrases have a new, arresting beauty.

Struck like a bell

The ongoing Callananization of Canadian poetry continues with a new interview at Salty Ink where Chad Pelley says the poems in Mark's new book Gift Horse leave him "struck like a bell." Though Mark admits to some frustration with his own process:

I find writing extremely difficult to do; I’m too concerned with doing it well to actually enjoy myself. That being said, there’s a moment that comes, countless drafts in, when the elements that constitute a poem start snapping into place, when all its little gadgetry suddenly works and those disparate pieces unite to a single purpose, when the trajectory of the poem seems inevitable—that’s the good bit: when the poem works, when it becomes more than the sum of its parts. Otherwise, it would seem like a lot of pointless toil and frustration.

More here.