The Deepening of the Colours

M.E. Kappler was a Toronto freelance writer.

In The Deepening of the Colours Gail Fox writes about lovers, friends, and children. And also of poetry... “a kind of ecstasy that/lasts until the thirst/returns.” The title poem is about the necessary pain of perception and transformation...“The war within and the war without,” the need to “embrace this violence” and the subsequent peace “like the month of winter” that follows. It is a fine poem, perhaps the best in the collection, and seems to state a theme that recurs many times throughout the book. For example, in “The Human Condition,” Fox writes of how the sight of a tree moves her beyond the awareness of her own limitations and into an understanding that “without this spirit, we perish.” This poem, a long, eight-part reflection, is a meditative, ultimately transcendent poem about light and dark and the ongoing dialectic between them and their cognates: despair and joy. Throughout the book light is a recurrent image as perception is a recurrent theme.

There are two “poems for voices” in this collection. “Winter Storm” is a somewhat disconnected, but nevertheless powerful collection of speeches for three characters who are all in an unspecified ward, possibly psychiatric. The poem is about despair and the unspoken dynamics that can be created among casually juxtaposed strangers. In “Spring Comes for Mrs. Evans,” Mrs. Evans, who is temporarily incarcerated in a nursing home, initially fails to recognize her son Richard and, addressing him as “young man” complains about the cruelties of her son Richard. The poem lacks the intensity of “Winter Storm” and at best achieves a valid irony.

While a certain unity of theme and some very well-crafted poems gives the book quality and authority, there are also curiously flat pieces. On the whole, though, The Deepening of the Colours is a good, if somewhat uneven, book.