Stone Wear: A Sequence of the Blood

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

This book is two in one, equal parts of the poems of Dianne Joyce and those of Eva Tihanyi. The publisher saves money and the reader samples two poets in one purchase. There is one serious drawback, however; with two poets the reader is invited to compare, to prefer one to the other. With three or more poets, the invitation is not so explicit and the loser does not suffer undeserved criticism.

Dianne Joyce is a mother, poet, and M.A. student living in Ontario. Many of her poems are beautifully vivid portraits drawn in well-selected words, neither verbose nor thin. These portraits are readily shared with the reader, as visual as any oil or watercolour portrait. On a shopping trip, a mother and daughter disagree about a red comb: “neither is / satisfied / they left / empty / it will / probably gnaw / at them.” In “Stage Fright” the dancer, waiting in the wings for her cue, tenses in anticipation. “Grandma” is a still-life, a stuffed doll who sits outside a shop door. Joyce excels at blending images. In “Pavillion” the dancing girl blends into the lifeguard who teaches her to swim then “dove / into her lake bed.” “Going Nowhere” and “Seeds” are superbly sustained metaphors. All Dianne Joyce’s poems are a delight, well worth reading again and again.

Eva Tihanyi’s poems are the emotions of a young woman caught in an unsatisfying love affair. She writes of love, sex, man-woman relationships, dreams of romance, and the heat of summer, with one focal point: the man she loves. Because the choice of words is a little careless and the images are secondary to emotions, the poems have minimal appeal to an outsider. In “Vigil,” for example, she waits at night for his long-overdue return and concludes with a suspect assumption that all women experience this waiting. Young women suffering turbulent love affairs may appreciate these poems; others will find them immature, repetitious, and too subjective.