I like these words. :)
Here's the full review:
Leedahl collection maturely defines a changing life
By Bill Robertson, For The StarPhoenix
Poet and fiction writer Shelley Leedahl was long a resident of Saskatoon before moving to Middle Lake and then pushing on to Sechelt, B.C. She's also spent time in Eastend and in writing colonies in Scotland, Georgia and Spain. She vigorously mines her time in all these places, moving from one to the next like a bee through a garden, taking a bit of experience here and there for each of the poems in her latest collection, Wretched Beast.
This book also finds Leedahl on the move as a parent, wife, lover, friend and, though she doesn't use the word, earnest student of the literary arts, particularly poetry. And it seems the more she moves, sees and learns, the less she's willing to admit she knows. In Lucien Lake I and II she addresses her daughter: "Soon you will know/ the matter with me/ is the longer I go the less I become." This second poem in the collection sounds a note that will be repeated through the poems: The persistence of lack, of less than enough.
In Photograph she walks beneath an arched bridge "where I have stood too long growing older/ and knowing ever less," and in Last Poem from the Adirondack Chair she says, "Listen. Time and self-sabotage/ cannot be stopped." Well, most would agree with the time part. The idea of being sabotaged, however, whether by others or one's self, owes itself to a certain degree of insecurity, with which artists of many stripes seem to wrestle. In this collection, Leedahl wears those insecurities like badges.
But consider the titles: Toward Winter (Saying Goodbye to the House), The Insomniac Courts the Moon, You Leave Again, Affair with an Older Man and the title poem. They chart a hectic course for the heart and for the writing. No wonder she tells us all the reading she's done (Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Charles Wright, etc.) and the poems she's been working at. She reassures herself, and her readers, that despite all her upheavals, she's still at work at her craft. She, and by extension, we, should take her seriously.
She needn't worry. Amid her many poems of goodbyes and finding a new life and the sense of huge longing that's made manifest in all these changes - the starving in Trivialities; the hoped-for intervention in Landscape - Leedahl includes poems that are mature, confident and marvellously realized.
This book also finds Leedahl on the move as a parent, wife, lover, friend and, though she doesn't use the word, earnest student of the literary arts, particularly poetry. And it seems the more she moves, sees and learns, the less she's willing to admit she knows. In Lucien Lake I and II she addresses her daughter: "Soon you will know/ the matter with me/ is the longer I go the less I become." This second poem in the collection sounds a note that will be repeated through the poems: The persistence of lack, of less than enough.
In Photograph she walks beneath an arched bridge "where I have stood too long growing older/ and knowing ever less," and in Last Poem from the Adirondack Chair she says, "Listen. Time and self-sabotage/ cannot be stopped." Well, most would agree with the time part. The idea of being sabotaged, however, whether by others or one's self, owes itself to a certain degree of insecurity, with which artists of many stripes seem to wrestle. In this collection, Leedahl wears those insecurities like badges.
But consider the titles: Toward Winter (Saying Goodbye to the House), The Insomniac Courts the Moon, You Leave Again, Affair with an Older Man and the title poem. They chart a hectic course for the heart and for the writing. No wonder she tells us all the reading she's done (Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Charles Wright, etc.) and the poems she's been working at. She reassures herself, and her readers, that despite all her upheavals, she's still at work at her craft. She, and by extension, we, should take her seriously.
She needn't worry. Amid her many poems of goodbyes and finding a new life and the sense of huge longing that's made manifest in all these changes - the starving in Trivialities; the hoped-for intervention in Landscape - Leedahl includes poems that are mature, confident and marvellously realized.
Read more: http://www.thestarphoenix.com/news/Leedahl+collection+maturely+defines+changing+life/6352535/story.html#ixzz1rr91VuQL
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