The Female Eunique

Mark Bastien was a Toronto-based journalist.

“Yawn,” the first poem in this collection, warns the reader he might “rather be safely asleep” than read a book of “Canadian women’s poetry.” Dale Loucareas need not worry about dozing readers, because The Female Eunique, her second book, is a lively, if uneven, collection of poems about marriage.

Loucareas writes with wit and assurance about her “relatively stable existence complete with house, husband and kids in North York.” Infidelity and sexual politics are the main subjects of her mostly very short poems. She writes plain, uncluttered sentences that make her book a quick, refreshing read. Loucareas confronts her targets simply and directly and in the process reveals a complex, interesting woman. The weakness of the collection is that the 64 poems are of wildly uneven quality. They are often crammed three on a page and give the book a cramped, thrown-together look. Many of the poems about sexual encounters in the second half of the book repeat themselves. The author’s equation of marital sex with prostitution becomes tiresome; her metaphors using the male sex organ droop with repeated use.

More often than not, the titles of the poems trivialize or make redundant the words that follow. Sometimes in the middle of poems the author stops to point out the symbolism in her words. “Symbolic /Don’t you think” she writes about giving her wedding ring to a prostitute in “Hooked.” These practices are jarring and unpleasant. But some of the poems have a contemporary, consumer-mentality wit. “Close Encounters of the Casual Kind,” “Housefrau Fantasy,” and “All But Me” give the reader a glimpse of an unusual housewife, whose sexuality as “safely disguised /In kimono and curlers.” “Contemptuous” is a disarming bilingual poem about flatulence.

Loucareas packs too much of too little in The Female Eunique: most of the poems are as slight as the collection’s title, but there are a few delights for the unsuspecting reader.