The Dark Side of the Moon

Melanie Marttila is a Sudbury-based freelance writer and writing
consultant.

As part of the St. Thomas Poetry Series, The Dark Side of the Moon
offers “a perspective on human life that emphasizes its metaphysical
and philosophical dimensions.” This is a heady introduction indeed,
and a fair amount to live up to for poet Gail Fox, whose first
collection of poetry was published in 1969.

While there are treasures to be found in the poetry (“A poem? I
wonder. A street open to all traffic, perhaps”), it often seems as if
Fox is trying to live up to the promise of abstract metaphysical
revelation. She explores a wide range of subjects in her poems
(children, illness, suicide, death, and love), vacillating from common
experience to personal (but significance-laden) event without managing
to strike the universal chord.

Absent in these largely imagistic poems is the twist that invites
readers into the life from which those images derive. In “Tim,” Fox
describes how a mother is estranged from her adolescent son. Her
“Epiphany” is a little deeper, but the event is all the reader is
offered; the meaning is entirely subjective. Without signposts to guide
them, some readers may be at a loss as to how to negotiate The Dark Side
of the Moon.