Anyone Skating on That Middle Ground

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

This is Robyn Sarah’s fourth book of poetry. Slowly and surely she is finding her own voice, refining her technique, transcending a predilection to egoism and sentimentality. One critic has aptly said that “...Sarah eschews the dramatics of beginnings and endings for the long haul in-between, the space that most of us inhabit most of the time. Instead of ecstasy and despair, here are the quieter moments of pleasure, confusion and disappointment. For Sarah this is where that sultry shifting thing called truth might be found.” In a gentle, dreamy sort of way, she presents the truth to us, amid impressionistic snatches of domestic detail: the sun splashing on the floor, a hand in an upstairs window pouring coffee from a metal pot. This is the middle ground for Sarah, a search for balance and wholeness in a precarious world. “A campstool, a tin pot, and an old / umbrella, stage props for a stay / against confusion.”

Another theme that concerns Sarah is that of space — distances between people, between the said and the unsaid, and distances between one’s desires and reality.

Sarah uses a variety of devices. Some poems are fragments of thought, others are longer narratives, a few are prose poems. Often she uses an arresting turn of phrase. “Triggered by wind, the twinned / and single wings copter / off maples.”

In some poems (“Meridian,” “On My Son’s Birthday,” “Black Walnut”) repetitions of end rhymes are used effectively to create a feeling of the passing of time. In some instances this repetition takes on a Gertrude Stein-like repetition that is flat; occasionally she lapses into a maudlin sentimentality. At times, leaving the security of everyday Canadian vernacular, she falls prey to a pretentious alliteration (“fall’s loosed leaves lie / ungathered at the curb”) . She is at her best in evoking the “little things,” the “music of non-events.” “The old rainy nights / are fled with their little / lights winking between wet / leaves.”