To the New World

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Carmelita McGrath is a St. John’s editor and author. Reflecting her
small-town roots and

working-class ancestry, To the New World presents socially relevant
poetry with a moral edge.

McGrath’s social conscience is best demonstrated in the first poem,
“Touring the Manor Houses,” which articulates her impatience with
exhibits of upper-class life. The speaker prefers to view “the kitchen
... the slop buckets, the vessels of disposal” and other details of
servants’ lives. This is not a dispassionate call for worker-centred
history, but an affirmation of ancestors, “the women whose features I
bear.”

Grim new dimensions are skilfully added to familiar situations. In
“If I Could Give You Now,” the narrator regrets telling a friend the
truth about Santa Claus, unaware that this mythological male was a
substitute for the real one who had sexually abused her. In “For the
First Time in Months, She Feels Her Feet,” a fisherman’s widow
recalls her husband’s adultery and beatings.

Although McGrath provides realistic views of island life, the third
section of “Aphrodisiacs for a Newfoundland Winter” inspires
stereotypes. When the protagonist bestows on his beloved a char wrapped
in paper, an outlandish image of a thick-headed fisherman offering a
bouquet of carp may form in the minds of readers “from away.”

The title poem, “To the New World,” presents McGrath at her best
and worst. The phrase “dreamed in her vagina” arouses snickers. What
saves the poem is its sharp social criticism and the observation that
explorer John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) was not “the first to change a
name for smoother sailing with the English.”