Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios

Betsy Struthers is a poet and novelist and the author of Found: A Body.

Such an intriguing title promises poems that are provocative and out of
the ordinary. In this, her second collection, Toronto writer Helen
Humphreys succeeds in arresting moments of memory and insight with turns
of phrase that entrance the ear, and engage the mind’s eye.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Virginia
Woolf’s Kitchen,” sets the collection’s tone. The poems are
constructed with simple lines, listing details of weather or place.
Humphreys uses refrains and parentheses to underscore the mundane
reality with memories; for instance, in “Was It Dark?” the
descriptive soliloquy of a woman in her suburban backyard on an August
evening is bracketed by memories of a lover and their failure to
communicate.

The second section, “Brochures,” contains capsule descriptions of
tourist pamphlets, a wry around-the-world kaleidoscope. Here the
juxtaposition of concrete images reveals not just a simple collection of
pictures, but a mood and a political stance: “Three large shirtless
men on donkeys. / A woman on her back in the sand. / Nine small
inflatable boats / anchored in a harbour. / The sun is going down / or
coming up. / The water is red” (from “Greece and Turkey”).

The third section, “Souvenirs,” is a series of poems about memory
and childhood. Here again is the taut control of language: simple words
repeated—“Sometimes we are lucky. / Sometimes we remember / from the
whole / the moment that was the whole” (from “Visiting”); the
exploitation of images—“This is the hand / that stretches the arm /
that pulls the body after” (from “Badminton”); and the careful
rendering of the smallest detail to tell the whole story—“Our hands
on the table, / palms down, / inches apart” (from “Lines and
Spaces”).

The poems entice the reader to read them again, aloud, to appreciate
the nuances of humor, sadness, even despair about time and its passing
told in such understated but evocative language.