🚀 go-pugleaf

Summary: reading announcement of local interest, then
         a book description, bio notes, review quotes
         and some sample poems, of wider interest.

READING
-----------
Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton will read from her 
second book, "Allowing the Light" at 7:30 p.m. 
Monday Apr. 25 in room 315 of the VPL Central 
Library branch at Burrard and Robson in Vancouver.   
This is part of the VPL City Poets series, and 
part of Ms. Dalton's cross-Canada tour co-sponsored
by the Canada Council and Breakwater Books.
 [If this slips outside the set bc  distribution,
she is also reading in Banff this week and in
Toronto early in May.]


BOOK DESCRIPTION
-------------------
ALLOWING THE LIGHT         ISBN 1-55081-073-1
New Poetry by Mary Dalton
Mary Dalton's latest collection revisits the outports and cityscapes
invoked in her first collection, "The Time of Icicles."
In Allowing the Light she makes word-music about 
Newfoundland people and landscapes, often celebrating,
sometimes satirizing. The book is divided into four sections:

1. Veined Ways: links gardens and writing and eros.

2. The Body Cooling: light plays on states of alienation and desire.

3. Angling a Fuschia: focuses on the feminine, as reflected
               in child, mother, artist, lover, and in writing.

4. Dandelions and Rhubarb: a savage Swiftian light burns in 
           poems that lament Newfoundland's losses and celebrate its 
            landscape, language and culture.


BIO NOTES
------------------
Mary is an anglo-Irish literature and creative
writing professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Her first book, "The Time of Icicles" (ISBN 1-55081-039-1) 
was published in 1989, and "Allowing the Light"
was published in December, 1993.

She has published articles, reviews, interviews, radio
scripts, and review-essays on a variety of twentieth-century
writers, in Newfoundland journals and in international journals.
Samuel Beckett's work is one of her major research interests.
Most recently she has published an article on
``The Beothuck Motif in Newfoundland Literature'' and
an essay, currently in press, on the symbolism of the
Boatman series of paintings by Newfoundland artist Gerald Squires.

She is now working on a scholarly and historical
anthology of Newfoundland poetry from 
the seventeenth century to the present,
and a third collection of poetry.  


REVIEW QUOTES (for The Time of Icicles, the first book)
--------------------------------------
Dalton's poetry is rooted in the immediate landscape of
her surroundings as well as in the archetypal patterns
of a rich collective unconscious.  Sharp imagery of the
land, the city, the external realities of her Newfoundland
heritage intermingle easily with the symbols and the
metaphors of culture and the human condition to form
exquisite, often melodious and almost song-like 
(even chant-like) poems.  
            Peter Baltensperger,  Canadian Book Review Annual

... the musicality of her Newfoundland voice, its vernacular
joyfulness, and her obviously academically informed satire,
add special dimensions which give her poetry a special place.
For those now addicted to the splendid women's poetic tradition
that is growing up in this country ... voices like ...
Dalton's remind us that this is a culture where the real talent
has always come from the hinterland.
           Helen M. Buss, The Journal of Canadian Poetry


SAMPLE POEMS (short ones because I am lazy)
------------------------
buttercup poem

take this poem
buttercup
petals velvet, simple
face up to the sun
curved to hold rain--
look in, all's clear--
wheel of lacy yellow dust
the green exclamations

come into this poem
or are you wanting some
Rosicrucian software
moon-orchids
a syntax of torture--
this poem is open



The Book of Kells

reading the animals
you need to find
the eye first



Grace

i.m. E.J.D.

She is at home
In a room
Or a poem. In alcoves
Angling a fuschia
For last rays of sun.
Gauging the heft
Of image and vowel

In her house,
Chairs welcome
Space, form to pour in,
And windows, wordless, widen,
Avenues,
Allowing the light.




Mr. O'Brien's tea

Mr. O'Brien takes his tea
well-brewed: ``strong enough,'' he says, ``so
a little mouse could run over it.''



dead Indians

dead Indians are safer--
in poems, museums,
archaeological pamphlets,
bone pendants and ochre--
lament, monographs,
 no threat to our order

weeping walrus
we mourn the Beothuck
close the sky in
on Labrador Innu
the land wired and caribou fled




(untitled)

now is the time of icicles
now, Nootka, I cast off
my summer name
hold hard my winter name[6pt]
I am become Wolf
anew
dancing grinning among clowns
drumming
a song so vast it
pulls your world down



the old men are dying

vanished the acrobat lovers
in their hunched shoulders
the long caress of the scythe
who will uncover
those fields reclaimed
by the dog rose
coax out again
strawberry lushness
from caplin and dung

who'll tell us now
eyes dark, in pity and scorn
my duck, sure you don't know
what work _is_


The last two were from the first book, "The Time of Icicles".
Another poem,  "Four and Forty -- one wave cresting", was recently
chosen for an anthology of the best Canadian poems of 1993.

For any more information, feel free to e-mail me.
For those who know me, don't worry, she is a much 
better poet and speaker than her brother.
--
David Dalton ------------------------------ <Dalton@Geop.UBC.Ca> ------
  Dept. of Geophysics & Astronomy,                   (604) 822-2267
  2219 Main Mall, University of British Columbia      fax  822-6047
  Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4                           home 733-1303