Inside Out

Mark Bastien was a Toronto-based journalist.

Cathy Matyas writes about the people, things, and nature that fill her life in London, Ontario. Inside Out is a wonderful collection of 16 poems about that life: they celebrate the daily events that transcend the ordinary and become memory. The construction of the poems is as clear and precise as the images: glass, water, snow, and light. The author’s cool, clean language gives the poems a vivid, frosty sensuality.

One of Matyas’s favorite subjects is her own heart and its many contradictory incarnations. “The Heart” is a beautiful poem about rejected love. The author writes: “Cup your hands /around my heart. Feel /its warmth. Feel its beat.” In “Paralysis Poem” the heart is “a glass diamond that swings on blue fishing line,” fragile and dangerous. In “The Gift,” poems breathe in her heart, which enlarges “like a balloon warm air is forced into.” There are “hairline cracks in my ice heart” in “Love & the Onset of Winter: A Lament.” Matyas’s poems are as vibrant and vulnerable as these hearts. Below the stillness there is a beat, underneath the ice there is a shimmering warmth.

The simplicity of her verse is often touching. In “Solstice” she writes:

This is how we recreate

our lives: around red

teapots and things

cooking on the stove.

For Matyas, the joy of living is in “pressing bright leaves between waxed paper” and watching her African violet “gone hog wild with purple blooms.” Her joy bursts forth on the pages of this collection like the blooming violet.