This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Whether prose or verse, Karen Connelly’s words can be harsh or tender,
brutal or exquisitely sensitive. Like any fine lyricist, she shores up
beauty with pain and horror, which are never far away. This book was
inspired by Spain, Paris, and travels of the mind and heart.
Connelly’s Spain is not the sunny dream of beaches, but “Old Man
Rain, old warlock,” a relentless antagonist: “in a winterkill of
wind and rain / the mind’s speckled shell cracks in a day”; or Ana,
a black-skirted servant with green-veined arms: “For supper she drinks
coffee, / dips her biscuits like a raccoon, / all dark eyes, quick
paw.”

The experience of life that lies in and beneath these poems is unusual
for a woman of 23. In “No Green Tongue,” the first day of spring,
“wrung from the taut skin of winter,” reminds the narrator “of the
arms of young men severed in warring countries / cleaned to a porcelain
gleam by ants and maggots.” As for love, “the word is absurd, / no
longer taken seriously / by yourself or by any of your friends.”

Connelly’s Touch the Dragon, about her travels in northern Thailand,
won a Governor General’s Award in 1993. This is a writer to savor, and
to watch.