Escaped Domestics

Valerie Senyk is director of theatre arts at Thorneloe College,
Laurentian University.

Robin McGrath has won accolades for her fiction and now presents her
first book of poetry. Its three parts (entitled “Escaped Domestics,”
“Among the Lyme Grasses,” and “The Ships of Tarshish”) take the
reader on a journey from home in Newfoundland, to the Arctic, to
Jerusalem, and back home again.

McGrath’s storytelling abilities are strong, but there is a dearth of
intellectual or artistic bite in these poems. Although occasionally a
line or phrase jumps out with an enlivening freshness (e.g., “Today I
lent a hot poet / An air conditioner / To cool his fevered
imagination”), much of the language is trite and dull, as in “My
mouth remembers still / The grey and curling beard / And the mouth I
dared to kiss.”

Perhaps McGrath should skin her experiences in the same way she
describes women skinning rabbits, to find the real guts and meat of
them.