The Strength of Materials

Susan McKnight is an administrator of the Courts Technology Integrated Justice Project at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

One definition of “elegy” is a poem written in a nostalgic or
melancholy mood, and that is what Tregebov has written in this
collection. She has created elegies for things as diverse as “the
subway” and “want,” and in each poem she uses a specific thing to
ask for answers to deeper questions of life. Her poetic style is simple
and straightforward, but her questions are often those to which humans
have been searching for answers for centuries: “Where do you go / in
between the not and the knowing, what / becomes of you?” She doesn’t
offer many answers, but by the very nature of her pondering, arouses
camaraderie with the reader, an urge to start a similar quest for
answers.

Her poetry is rooted to the material things of the world and she
highlights their often-neglected importance in our lives—for example,
a black mitt left in the snow that leads her to question all those
things lost in life and all those things collected.

Tregebov introduces her collection with a quote from Oliver Sacks’s
Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, which describes the
possible existence of an original human language, a universal language
from the heart. She stays true to this concept in her elegies, in the
simple, heartfelt delivery of her thoughts.