In the Old Country of My Heart

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

This first collection by a widely anthologized Newfoundland poet begins
where the poet’s life began, with the straitlaced rhetoric of her
old-school mother: “Body, she said, we never said body then, / it was
too bold, we said system.” However, she also recognizes her
daughter’s talent: “It’s your tongue too that was dipped / in blue
ink, and do go leaking iambics / all the day long.”

The poet recalls “hop-scotch on the corner,” a family boarder named
Alfred (“He must have been 300 Pounds”), and a rainstorm in Nazare,
Portugal. She also remembers days when there was “no time for
poetry” and when “escape” was “the biting of the pen tip.”
During this time of apprenticeship as a writer, her hero was Anne
Sexton, who taught her that poems “are the arrows / piercing our
limited space.” In this book about language, the poet is a “stumbler
after words”; her words “think they are chisels / that can chip away
the miles.”

In these lyrical, imagistic poems, Walsh persuasively combines regional
and universal themes.