Review
A DAY’S GRACE: POEMS 1997 - 2002
by Robyn Sarah
Porcupine’s Quill, 80 pp.
Robyn Sarah is a deeply unfashionable poet. We should be glad of this, because her lack of regard for trends allows her to turn her poetic eye on subjects the fashionable poet ignores. And her eye illuminates things we ignore and should not, and does so in such a way that the common reader of poetry – if there is such a thing, after all the attempts, from Eliot to Creeley on through Wah and Beaulieu, to alienate the common reader of poetry – will delight in them.
Her credo is set out plainly enough: she likes poems with "boogie" and with "about." One is right to be generally suspicious of poems that are themselves about poetry, but Sarah pulls off a few in this volume without disgracing herself or her subject. Consider "Poem:"
The poem is a small machine
to move the heart.
Set it at ‘start’
and let it shift the mind
from one plane to another.
When the heart’s a heavy stone
the mind can’t hope
to lift alone,
slip it between.
The poem is a lever.
I can’t recall it having been put so well before, or so memorably, and isn’t the memorability of poems their point? Sarah’s voice is exceedingly refreshing, not least because she understands that the music of poems – the "boogie" – is a massive part of their meaning – the "about."
Sarah will likely take a licking from critics (if they deign to notice her at all) and certainly from academics, because, like Philip Larkin’s, there’s not much to say about her poems once they’ve been read. They’re not multivalently ambiguous, not mysterious, not difficult. They’re well-crafted, well-executed lyrics, often with a modicum of internal or (less often) end rhyme which leavens them in the mind.
Not all the pieces here are great, of course, and a few would have been best left unpublished ("O – I should never/have let the vet/cut the cat"). But even if there were only a couple of truly fine poems in A Day’s Grace – and there are more than that – it would place her well ahead of the rabble. It’s a joy to have discovered her.
|
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.