Bonding with Gravity

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

Two charming photographs preface the sections of this delightful book of
poems—the first, two young girls on a trampoline; the second, the same
girls doing handstands outdoors. They complement the text, though we
don’t know if they are the poet and her sister, the poet and her
friend, or the poet’s daughters. The poems cover a lot of family
ground, from the marriage of the poet’s parents, through a moving
tribute to her grandmother, and on to pieces about mothering her own
children. So we find out quite a bit about the person behind the poems,
though the poems are never self-indulgent or sentimental. They do what
good poems should—shed a ray of light on an ordinary event, making it
extraordinary. Flood tells about an accident with red wine that ruins
her favorite white coat, about her aging father’s determination to
still do the physical work he did as a younger man, about her daughters
discovering magic in the shapes of icicles. Moving beyond the personal,
we read about the birth of the world’s tiniest surviving twins, about
a dead fox in the city, about a local murder–suicide. These are
well-crafted poems, without extraneous words. With a deft hand, the poet
gives us glimpses of things real and imagined, taking us on a journey
that is both satisfying and difficult. She makes us experience and feel,
and think about those feelings. Bonding with Gravity will draw the
reader back again and again, and each time something new will be found.