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Alert to Glory

by Sally Ito

Sally Ito’s third collection of poetry is dedicated to God, “with whom the soul most richly desires communion.” In spite of some clever phrasing and musical language, it contains little that formally, structurally, or stylistically makes the poems feel like the product of a particular imagination. Ito’s religious sensibility, however, is consistent throughout, and adds an unusual and welcome dimension to Canada’s largely secular poetic landscape.

The book’s first section begins with a series of praise-songs. In these poems, the debt to Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ecstatic tones and clever phrasing is evident. The “I” introduced later in the book is absent from this first section, a burning away of the self that allows the poems to move with an agility and energy missing from the more narrative parts of the collection. The last two sections equate the vocation of poetry with spiritual practice in an explicitly personal manner.

The poems pull – thematically, imagistically, rhetorically – toward two poles: the hereafter, and the unblemished, cherubic spirit of childhood. As an example of the first, “Bisque” is framed as a dream visitation from Margaret Avison. “Pull Toy,” by contrast, locates the soul in the string attached to a toy being manipulated by a child – this poem has one of the more delicately crafted and powerful endings in the book.

The world between these poles is presented as one of perpetual yearning for the two states of being; unfortunately, this inhibits Ito from rendering the here and now in a sufficiently three-dimensional way. In one poem, for example, fellow churchgoers are reduced to a series of hands on their partners’ necks – a symbol of love – but this draws us away from the particularity of the individuals and focuses instead on the abstract idea they represent.

Characters’ predicaments, furthermore, are too easily grafted onto familiar stories: literary ambition is equated with the parable of Jonah and the Whale; a sleeping child in a carriage is unsurprisingly transformed into a fallen cherub. There are glorious moments throughout this collection, surely, but some riskier, less wilfully shaped ones would have been welcome.

 

Reviewer: Nick Thran

Publisher: Turnstone Press

DETAILS

Price: $17

Page Count: 92 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-88801-379-8

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2011-9

Categories: Poetry