Another Voice

Shannon Hengen is an associate professor of English at Laurentian
University and the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors,
Reflections and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry.

Alisa Satchel’s first collection of poems is highly traditional in
structure, containing verse that is often composed in regular rhyme
schemes and metrical patterns. But despite this weight of convention,
Satchel achieves originality in several poems, voicing a fresh
viewpoint, presenting “another voice.”

Some of the poems deal with a significant event in Satchel’s or her
family’s life. Recurring themes treat the life cycle, nature, and
time, as well as the human condition and what improves it—love,
tolerance, companionship, art. That Satchel writes from a distinctive
point of view marks some of these poems as exceptional. Where the poet
is weakest, however, is in her language, which is flat, and in her
almost complete neglect of imagery.

A playfulness and sensitive intelligence inform her best pieces.
“Identity,” for example, opens: “I see in other faces / The places
I have been // And in the other places, / The people I have seen // Seem
also to be searching / For the face they used to be.” Here, and
throughout the volume, the poet’s understatement satisfies.