The Taste of Giving: New and Selected Poems

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

This collection, combining the poetry from Zonailo’s seven most recent
books with about 23 pages of new poetry, shows her to be a lyric poet of
some magnitude.

Her poems encompass themes and subjects ranging from her Doukhobor
heritage, with its unique brand of feminism, to her British Columbian
background and the Canadian winter landscape itself. Her imagery
reflects both tenderness and strength. “False Passage,” describing
islands near Desolation Sound, subjects the primal elements of sea,
stone, and blood to a metamorphosis that fuses myth and reality: “To
know the land, to / become it, I give birth to a stone child, mouth / a
hard entrance. Seal pools / her warm foetal waters; / live kelp a natal
cord.”

She handles narrative in “Visiting Aunt Annie’s” as deftly as she
employs imagism in “Steller’s Jay” and “Bowl.” For her, Circe
and the Sibyl are as alive in the Canadian landscape as they were to
ancient Greeks. Mingling with Zonailo’s mythical imagery, the
evanescent cherry blossoms and the dark branches of dreaming catalpa
trees color her new world.

Her work is accessible yet profound, like the salt-water pool by
Lumberman’s Arch to which she so trustingly consigns herself, diving
into the “heart at the heart of life.”