Mortal Arguments

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Sue Sinclair sees poetry as a matter of life and death, as her title
implies. Mortal Arguments is not despairing but questioning. The sun and
stars preside over it in repeated images: they are representatives of
fire in the dialectical scheme of the four elements that she has
borrowed from the philosopher Heraclitus. Her lyric gifts are
considerable. Images like “The aspens roll back the whites / of their
eyes, panicked” are fine discoveries of the imagination. And her
description of the effects of “Dreams” is completely convincing. The
poem ends, “When you wake up, a slight / change inside you. Your
suitcase was searched. / Everything’s still there / but shifts / when
you pick it up.” Perhaps to avoid overusing the lyric first-person
singular, she pushes the pronouns “we” and “you” more than she
needs to do. Her poems are usually set in a vivid and recognizable
world, but the probing she does into the roots of things is profound.
Her visionary bent is qualified by an awareness of human suffering: she
knows very well that even Socrates was mortal, but what a mortal he was,
and what arguments he had with existence.