A Day's Grace: Poems 1997–2002

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Robyn Sarah has been publishing poems since the late 1970s, and has
achieved a reputation among the more discerning of her fellow poets for
her fastidious search for the precise word and the appropriate rhythm
(tributes by Don Coles and Eric Ormsby are quoted in cover blurbs). She
trained as a classical musician, and her poems frequently have musical
titles, as in the much-anthologized “Fugue,” “Intermezzo in a
Minor Key,” and, in this new collection, “The Orchestre du
Conservatoire Rehearses in Salle St.-Sulpice.” This musical
preoccupation extends to the technique evident in her poems: the sound
of her verse is invariably a part of her meaning.

Sarah’s poems centre upon moments, insights, experiences that
transcend the ordinariness of daily life. As she notes in “The
Face,” “a grace resides in mysteries like these.” “Grace” is,
indeed, a recurrent and essential word in Sarah’s writings, though it
generally has secular rather than religious connotations. She follows
her advice in “Bounty”: “Make much of something small.”

Stylistically, her poems range from exquisitely modulated free verse to
highly accomplished sonnets. The words seem simple—often
commonplace—but every word, every vowel, every consonant fits into an
elaborate pattern of sound. Her poems need to be read slowly, and
preferably aloud. Individual lines should be savoured, rolled around the
tongue: “pistachio shells, peel of a clementine”; “the white
cloth, dropped on the sere ground”; or (a more complex instance)
“The heart has its stops and starts. / Sometimes you wake with the
taste / of death in your mouth, / like bitter silver.”

Sarah is not a poet of the grand statement, though a cluster of poems
about the coming of the new millennium is thoughtful as well as
eloquent. Admirers of her earlier volumes will take similar pleasure in
this new collection of her most recent poems.