Her Festival Clothes

Lynn Szabo is an assistant professor of English and Coordinator of
Freshman English Courses at Trinity Western University.

The poems in Mavis Jones’s fifth book of poetry range from the palaces
of the Raj in remembered colonial India to the rainforests and beaches
of British Columbia’s western reaches.

The opening segment, “Royal Silks,” compels readers along
remembered narratives transposed over present settings where jungle
creatures and memsahibs intersect in breathless anticipations of the
exotic. The subsequent divisions of the collection lead us from Wales to
Vancouver’s Spanish Banks and Granville Island, from Sarawak to Kuala
Lampur, from Paris to the Spanish plains and mountains. Although diverse
and fragmented, the collection offers characters whose consciousness
pervades the poems and their narratives, indicating a poet who imagines
the imaginations of the characters and who is highly intimate with
nature and her creatures, carefully naming and specifying their
singularities. “Intertidal Heart,” the collection’s namesake,
chronicles nature’s historiography of love as seen through the
articulate sensibilities of one who has learned that “waiting and
meditation / are the work of stones, / the future grows upon us / like
moss. Only listen, / love is the raven’s shadow.”

The poetic language of the collection is fertile with musicality and
fresh metaphor. Fishing and swimming stories are stilled into images of
“kelp and focus” and “shoals of fish under ships.” “Sky
Dance” mimes the frenzy of blue where Dora and Susan dance “as far
and bright as the evening star” in run-on lines punctuated only by
commas gasping for breath.

The last poems in this volume resonate with rituals and stories from
Christian liturgy and art. Jones’s festival clothes and expansive
imagination reflect her poet’s mantra throughout this lovely
collection: “We each sing this song once / here, among the living.