Absorbing the Dark

Betsy Nuse, the former owner of Boudicca Books, is a Vancouver poet,
writer, and editor.

Absorbing the Dark includes some quite immediate and successful poems.
These include a recollection of Sunday tea at a grandmother’s (“My
Welsh Grandparents”), a mourning poem using Arthurian symbols (“Once
and Future”), and a lilting “Charm to Nourish Love.” These works
express emotion directly, using very few metaphors. But sometimes the
sentiments are deadened by a lofty, formal tone, or by the use of
abstraction or description instead of metaphor.

The collection is divided into four parts: “The Great Goddess,”
“Woman as Power Channel,” “Woman as Crone/Dragon,” and “Woman
as Sacred Vessel.” Each part is introduced by a short, dense essay on
the origin, mythology, and significance of the section’s theme. These
systems of understanding are the sources of Beryl’s work, the filter
through which her poems interpret experience. But only inconsistently do
the words escape their prosaic, intellectual context, with its heavy
vocabulary, and soar artfully.

Absorbing the Dark is more dense and intellectually challenging than
directly appealing, but it makes interesting use of mythical and
religious ideas.