The Loneliness Theme

David A. Kent teaches English at Centennial College and is the editor of
Christian Poetry in Canada.

Dale Loucareas’s The Loneliness Theme is a small, modest chapbook comprised of 27 lyrics. Although the poems are occasionally perceptive, honest, and witty they are usually obviously therapeutic exercises designed to heal a “mind-split” referred to in a biographical afterword. Child/parent/lover relationships dominate Loucareas’s concerns as she seeks “attention and affection” to end her isolation. One could certainly wish for more discipline in diction and expression (“Your shifting love/A pellucid pool of refracted mystery”), for fewer poems with epigrammatic closure on corny questions (as in “Time Zones”: “What are the stars like/On your side of the world/Does the Dipper have a lip”), and for less sentimentality and melodrama. The bleak vision of suburban domesticity, a promising component of these poems, rubs awkwardly against the cloying fantasies of romantic fulfillment. The collection is, then, oddly annoying. Why alphabetize the table of contents and place it at the end of the book? Or is that a corny question?