Stoning the Moon

Bev Daurio was an editor and poet in Toronto.

Carolyn Smart’s third collection of poetry, Stoning the Moon, begins with an epigraph from D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love which describes a man standing in the night heaving stones at “the white-burning centre of the moon.” Between this and the black cover with macabre/surrealist etching, the reader is prepared to meet melodrama and perhaps worse. Wrongly.

Smart’s poetry is tightly honest, unafraid of exploring those corners of the relationships between men and women which involve violence, fear, and dependence: “thinking of Doug saying even before he found out/that his wife lied to him for months sneaking around/even with the kids there he pulled her down the stairs/by her hair and told her to tell all the village/what she’d done but she and the kids are all I’ve got,” as well as love and tenderness: “you were sugar on my tongue/the fragrance of white lilies/they fill up the room you said.”

The book is a progression from a lonely young woman’s experiences, like a landslide of impressions, through alienation, to love, birth, and a connection with society. Smart has a constant edge of exploration in her voice, a questioning and vulnerability which says, when speaking of the darkest things, that it wishes it were wrong.