Season of Mercy

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Sally Ito had a good idea for the book that eventually developed into
Season of Mercy. She knows that poetry requires a serious subject, and
she found one in the search for a fulfilling spiritual life. These are
poems that reflect a number of human cultures—Christian, Japanese, the
classical world—and draw on various aspects of her own experience as
woman and as seeker. They do not form a poetic sequence, but the
interconnections of theme and overall subject give the impression of a
long poem.

Unfortunately, she does not seem to have paid sufficient attention to
the discipline of verse. There are occasional striking images—“a
tree shuddering / with wind,” “Stone splendour / and the blue
distance of words / cleave me in two”—but few attempts to control
the cadences of a line or the shape of a whole poem. There are too many
slack lines, too much of what Robert Graves called “putty” between
one insight and another. What we have here are the promising early
drafts of poems.

I am sorry to have to write this. I opened Season of Mercy with
anticipation, since I respect the kind of poetic meditation that is
being offered. But thoughtfulness and sincerity (Ito has plenty of both)
are not in themselves enough. “Free verse” is a misnomer: subtlety
of cadence, control of word order and word placement, a delicate
response to the sound of words in relation to each other—all these
need to be considered. Technique can be a hard taskmaster, but it is
inescapable. Ito needs to think hard and long about these matters. I
hope she will do so, since an interestingly independent mind is at work
here.