Gods and Other Mortals

Sharon Goodier was a poet in Toronto.

Humphries is a master builder. She lays words like brick, images overlapping to strengthen the concepts (“We have shrunk the day down to this shrivelled echo, this convent of whispers.”) In some cases the mortar hardens too soon and the images fall apart. Some bricks are broken to begin with. But mainly the book rises poem by poem to become a retreat for our minds and imaginations.

The first section is the weakest: contrived wisdom, images that don’t work, abstractions that confuse. The next section is a brilliant non — conversation for four voices each articulating a field of vision and visionary fields. The monologues are about relationships, modern life, alienation, longing. Each speaker is an occasion for a deeper empathy with the world we live in. The voices are us.

In the third section we find ourselves in the old woman who “half thinks/she is waiting for something/but night ...whispers she has half found it.” The fourth section resurrects mythological figures and in their comments and characters we find the present prophesied.

Humphreys’ use of language is very skillful. Some poems cover us in an avalanche of paradoxes that illumine the underlying mystery. Sometimes we are ambushed by sudden juxtapositions of words and phrases. Always we are following a map we must decode to find the buried treasure.