Blue Panic

Sheila Martindale is poetry editor of Canadian Author and Bookman and
author of No Greater Love.

These are intriguing poems, their subtle imagery tantalizing you to read
them again, to dig a little deeper for hidden meanings.

The first section consists largely of poems about family and friends,
about ancestry, and about how a person is a product of his or her past.
The poet speaks with her grandmother’s voice, telling a story of
courage and frustration. Or she remembers her Catholic schooling and the
guilt it imposed. There are also elegies to friends, and compassionate
sketches of the displaced and the dispossessed.

Section 2, “A Dozen Ways to Use the Heart,” is a prose poem in two
(or more?) voices. While evocative and powerful, this is in my opinion
the least successful part of the book.

“Life Sentence: A Chilean Sequence” makes up the third section. The
poems here are cogently understated, telling of the way ordinary people
go about their lives against a backdrop of silent terror. They put a
human face and heart on the complexities of life in a Third World police
state, like that of the old woman whose “world is this door / narrowed
to a tolerable slice.”

While the book is nicely produced (with a thought-provoking cover
illustration), there appear to be a number of typographical
errors—misspellings or missing words—unless of course the sometimes
odd syntax is intentional. Whatever the case, it does not really spoil
this excellent collection.