Quintet: Themes and Variations

Susannah D. Ketchum is a teacher-librarian at the Bishop Strachan School
in Toronto. She also serves on the Southern Ontario Library Services
Board.

Early in 1994, Pam Galloway, Eileen Kernaghan, Jean Mallinson, Sue
Nevill, and Clélie Rich began to experiment with shared themes. Their
explorations evolved into a series of well-received public readings that
led to the creation of this book. Quintet is a thoroughly enjoyable
collection of poems for readers willing to devote the time and the
attention that poetry requires.

The volume consists of 14 sections, each devoted to a different theme.
Each of the five poets has contributed a single poem or “variation”
to each theme. The themes, which include “Forgotten Arts,” “Going
to Extremes,” “Unexpected Gardens,” and “Secret Animals,” are
themselves enough to spark the reader’s imagination. Discovering how
the individual poets have interpreted the various themes adds to our
interest. For example, in “Strings,” Kernaghan begins by quoting the
artist Vasily Kandinsky: “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the
hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.” Rich writes of
weaving strands or strings of memories into a pattern. Galloway laments
that simple string games like cat’s cradle are of no interest to
“hands trained on electronic wizardry.” Mallinson recalls
Theseus’s quest through the Labyrinth, and Nevill speaks of
“bowstrings of light.”

For many parents, the final stanza of Kernaghan’s “questionnaire”
(contributed for the theme “Memory Lies in the Body”) will be
heart-stopping: “we dream of a child crying in a room whose doorway we
can never find again.” Readers interested in Canadian geography and
history will enjoy the “Old Words” poem “Power Shifts.” In it,
Jean Mallinson celebrates the return of Inuit place names: “Now as the
landscape / becomes a place to be at home in, / they [the ancient names]
feel good on the tongue / sounding the old syllables of what it means to
be here.”

The quality is not uniform throughout. Clélie Rich, for example,
eschews punctuation and (for the most part) capital letters; after a
while, this stylistic device loses its value and, in fact, begins to
irritate. Nevertheless, Quintet will be a source of pleasure for poetry
readers and a source of inspiration for creative-writing groups.