Blue Light: Bay and College

David A. Kent, editor of Christian Poetry in Canada, teaches English at
Centennial College in Scarborough.

McCracken’s fourth book of poems is marked by an engaging
self-assurance. Divided into four sections, the volume features poems
with shifting milieus—from the local and familial (both Ontario and
Ireland) to the remote and more exotic (including France, the southern
United States, and Italy). Yet whether here or there, McCracken’s eye
is caught by what she terms—in the final lines of her book—“the
strangeness of things outside ourselves / suddenly, here.” This enigma
of being may arise from memories of childhood, from personal
relationships, or from assorted other sources: animals, birds, nature,
or just things foreign.

McCracken writes with discipline and, almost always, restraint. She is
especially effective in rendering the visual; “Heron,” for example,
is a marvelous and striking portrait. Evident, too, is a love of words,
their shape and sound: thus her occasional effort to send readers to a
dictionary in search of roots and meanings (as I did with “rictus,”
“bawn,” “toucans,” and “phlox”). Allusions (to Asphodel and
Artemisia or to Florence and Ravenna) and the dreaming mode are other
qualities that add density or confirm the estrangement of the ordinary
(the latter, after all, has been a characteristic of poetic experience
and a quality much valued in lyricism over the past two centuries).

Behind or below memory and consciousness lurk more shocking
recognitions and “terminal ironies,” which McCracken teases to
articulation: a violent accident in “Japheth,” a dog drowning in
“Whistle,” hints of a fractured marriage, the dislocation of being
an expatriate, hints of “sin and retribution,” a death in the
family, or achieving independence from the primal figures of father and
husband. Despite the changing locales, these fundamental issues of
identity bind the poems together and are expressed by a poetic voice
that quietly envelops.