Clarity Between Clouds

Anne Burke is the editor of the Prairie Journal Press.

Although Ezra Pound could have accused these poems of “Amy-gism” due
to their long line and loose structure, Ioannou also shows she is
capable of haiku precision. Like Amy Lowell, she is dedicated to new
writers; as past editor of Cross-Canada Writers Quarterly, some of her
columns were reprinted as handbooks. Her manuscript reading service
endures as Wordwrights Canada.

The “clarity/clouds” dichotomy appears as a visual image in the
Lawren Harris cover print and in verbal images throughout this
collection of 42 poems. Ioannou gathered together the moods of her
earlier work, Spare Words, Motherpoems, and Familiar Faces/ Private
Grief. Two poems—“My Prussian Past Holds No Comfort” and “The
Dancers,” which were published in Solstice 2: The Truth and Fictions
of Ageing—reveal the basic tension: Leaving the textual emendations
aside, the first argues against ancestor worship and the second
counterposes this with kinetic energy.

Born in 1944, Ioannou uses her age as a vantage point from which to
view experience: relationships are like clothes to be worn and then cast
off. Despite the physical changes, including the threat of Alzheimer’s
disease, there is a sameness of aura (“In Your Light”) and a dubious
virtue, since “our years return us to ourselves.” We and our deaths
are “The Black Speck” in the eye of the universe. “‘Mothering
Days” is part of the section of poems on “Dawn Snow” referring to
“wonder: / our love of perfection, our need / to crunch our own marks
through the crust.”

This is precious language in the best sense of the
word—personification; onomatopoeia; art as motif (canvases, pastel
portraits, watercolors, still-lifes); a preoccupation with dreams,
nature, time passing, light, and color. Part 1, “Rimming the Dark,”
opens with questions, followed by a cycle of exploration and observation
to closure, like life itself. “We grow older,” Ioannou states
matter-of-factly, “gardens wither / step by step / children, husbands
/ leave us to ourselves.”