Hard Candy

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Linda Rogers’s collection is spare but strong, eloquent but clear. She
opens a chamber into the heart of the family, its comedies and
tragedies, the complicated pairings of love and lust, and innocence from
childhood to parenthood. The eternal questions of the father-daughter
relationship start a familiar paradigm. In “The Word on the Candy,”
she searches her past: “I’m sorry I laughed when you asked me /
‘Who is the handsomest dad in the world’ / I’m sorry I married the
wrong man.” In the next poem the bitter daughter must sing “because
of the sister / they scraped from my father’s / girlfriend’s
womb.” “Exotic fruit” from the outside world twists through the
scenes (e.g., the Chinese immigrant’s stage money smoking toward
heaven at a funeral, Woody Allen and Princess Di), but is followed by
childhood memories full of beauty and dangers (e.g., old Kloochma
paddling up with blackberries and dreamcatchers). Symbols, solid and
dependable, inform her work. A woman lays tile: “It is her job to
arrange / the glazed squares like a world.” Another poses for Man
Ray’s camera, “loving her like a bow, / the way the bass player
touches his ancient / appassionata.” Slanted to feminism but with an
unequivocal eye, Rogers plants the men on the sidelines but acknowledges
their power: “Do the boys rise up / like snowy owls, / their wings
stretched out ... as if the girls / were tundra mice ...?” Who are
you? What is your symbol? Her answer is simple and timeless. You are
your grandmother and your child, and sooner than you think.