Frogs in the Rain Barrel

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Sally Ito is a contemporary Emily Dickinson writing in the modern idiom.
The ABCB stanza isn’t there, but many of Dickinson’s other qualities
are: short poems, sharp images drawn from everyday life, a retelling of
seemingly trivial personal experience linked to huge themes, an almost
excessive interest in death but not self-destruction, and a liking for
phallic imagery. Both women have written memorable poems about snakes.

Where they differ is that Ito has not spent her adult life within the
confines of her father’s house but has traveled the world and seen
things and people Dickinson could only have dreamed about. Her world is
therefore less claustrophobic, less puritanically black and white.
Perhaps because isolation has not driven her back in on herself, her
poems are slightly less intense in their examination of the poet’s
psyche.

At times the poems are difficult to get into because there are so many;
each, it seems on a different subject with a different tone, each
beginning in great intensity. As a reader, I found them arduous to read
with as much intensity as was demanded. I have the same problem with
Dickinson.