Summer Grass

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

Marianne Bluger demonstrates a comfort with language and situation that
could come only from a practiced balance between the senses. She is at
once a celebrant of nature, of love, of faith, simple yet eloquent in
her beliefs. She can find in the hooking and examination of a salmon a
perfect parallel to the vulnerability of the human condition. And with
description she is no less accomplished. “Pearly violet stalks of
Indian Pipe” hypnotize her in the “boreal silence” as she breathes
the names of those long dead and longer loved. There are tinges of Frost
in her deceptively plain but evocative observations (“a dun sparrow
shakes / and the drops fly off”) and of Hopkins in her juxtapositions
(“and all around leafmold lying thick underfoot / pathetic if read /
instructs just the same”). Perhaps her training with haiku, a few of
which appear in the book, has helped her to hone her thoughts into the
purest and most effective of truths.