Shaking the Dreamland Tree

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

Regrettably, the limitations of space preclude the detailed analysis this exceptional book deserves. The three sections — dealing with mothering, love and other human connections, and the natural world — move the reader into an increasingly larger context. Several themes run throughout. Although mothering is the first section’s focus, ranging from several superb birth poems to the maternal urges of roaches and sharks, itechoes throughout. The threat of nuclear war, Catholicism, sexual relations, and man’s interaction with nature also reappear and reverberate.

Short lines and stanzas yield a tension that is the perfect vehicle for one of this poet’s many strengths, that of association between dissimilar things. Thus “Night Watch” links together images of light, static, ice, and a northern fantasy into an evocation of night writing. Most often the diction is couched in exciting imagery: from the detail of “the methyl/smell of damp stencils,” to the audacity of piano notes as “the percussion of manna/striking sand.”

McInnis is concerned, as we must all be, with “the algebra/of human suffering.” She rarely strays far from the personal, but her writing never degenerates into self-pity or negativism. “Nothing is fallow,”she writes, and indeed her whole world-experience is her garden. She is 30 years old. This is her first book. Buy it: enjoy and learn from it. It may well become a collector’s item.