Aurora

Sheila Martindale is poetry editor of Canadian Author and Bookman and
the author of No Greater Love.

This is a beautifully produced book, with a detail from Guido Reni’s
painting Aurora on the cover. The poems are varied in subject matter and
tone. There is dark humor in “Hey Diddle Diddle Frieze,” which
explores the strangeness of nursery rhymes, and “Biography of a
Woman,” in which all the fairy-tale heroines are rolled into one.
There are narratives about an escaped parrot and a flood. Some of
Thesen’s poems have titles that seem unrelated to their content, while
others contain odd juxtapositions of images. Among the collection’s
more inaccessible offerings is the final section of the book, Gala
Roses, a long stream-of-consciousness sequence that takes the reader on
a roller coaster of words that roar and howl without actually saying
anything intelligible.