Prophecies: Near the Speed of Light

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

This is Eva Tihanyi’s first full-length collection of poems, many of which appeared previously in literary magazines. Compared with her earlier collection, A Sequence of the Blood, which was published with Dianne Joyce’s Stone Wear, Prophecies shows a decided improvement in theme and technique. The subjectivity and carelessness of the earlier work are reduced in Prophecies.

In many of Tihanyi’s poems, experiences of personal day-to-day life are given macrocosmic context. She seems compelled to translate herself into terms of nature and the universe. In “Wanting” she expresses the desire to transcend the “borders of ourselves,” to “compare hands with God,” to nudge “something akin to creation.” Some poems — for example, “Kitchen Scene,” “Bequest,” and “Vertigo” — are verbose and superficial; the images seem pasted on and leave the reader cold: “I watch you douse the remnants of sleep / …despite the world’s continual dying /there is yet another day here.” “Let us climb /black heights to the stars /where the moon’s lungs /expand with silver.” Those poems such as “An Instant between Heartbeats,” “Easter Weekend among Friends,” and “Guillotine,” which are succinct with precise, careful images, are thought-provoking: there is more to the poems than their words. In “An Instant between Heartbeats,” “I hold the moon in my lap / …I am the lilacs in the valley /I am the rocks and the rain.” In “Breaths along the Run” she “gathers pebbles, shells, grass, /the invincibility of earth” and is renewed after communion with earth and sea. “They will say /that I grew into my images, /planted a world /in the leaf as it fell,” she writes in “Heirs.” This does indeed express the goal of Tihanyi’s poetry. The more poems she writes, the more the technique succeeds.