Portraits and Still Life

Lynn R. Szabo is an associate professor and chair of the English
Department at Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

The slim volume from Sheila Martindale’s prolific pen creates
portraiture in words, dedicated to and in remembrance of the binding
ties of family and friendship. At times, wrenching personal disclosure
shocks the reader along with the writer, uncovering the tragedies of
abuse and loss, the vicissitudes of childhood dyslexia and adult marital
failures. Unfortunately, their commonness serves to make them difficult
subjects for poetry without its falling prey to cliché.

Mostly free verse in form, the collection also offers its readers
various experiments with the sonnet, found poetry, and the poetic
letter. In “Sonnet to a Computer,” the poetic voice parodies courtly
love by indulging the wooing of the writer by the computer’s
cleverness: “Keyboard, hardware, software I now adore / And your
lovely e-mail even more.” Its metrical inconsistencies mirror its
deconstruction of convention, as does the humoresque secularization of
Psalm 23, in “Psalm for the Modern Motorist,” which outlines the
hazards and hopes of the highway-bound traveller. In “Renovations,”
the directions on a tin of crack-filler form the delightful motif of a
redecorator’s mandate. In a contrasting tone of irony and horror,
“Found Poem for September 11th” adopts the voice of the ancient
Hebrew prophet with all its certainty of destruction and retribution:
“In the City of York there will be a great collapse … / Your ways
and your doings / have brought this upon you.” The eerie echoes of an
enraged president add the sinister threats of the war to come: “Make
no mistake / we will hunt down those responsible.”

Although Portraits and Still Life is a collection most meaningful to a
private circle of readers, it opens to us the compressed experience of
life’s dimensions, assuring us in the volume’s finale that “Even /
after the end /of everything/ Still Life” prevails. The lovely pun
draws us to the writer who has discovered and believes this to be so.