Click to enlarge.

the moon with mars in her arms
Carolyn Zonailo
Ekstasis Editions
Victoria, B.C.
2006

Here is a collection of new poetry by an important visionary poet?one whose voice, craft and content are never complacent. In these lyric and meditative poems, Carolyn Zonailo records “intimations of mortality” as she contemplates age, death, and current political violence. She looks at the world through the perspective of her pacifist heritage. Zonailo also writes about love, memory, human nature, and the natural world, reminding us that we are all globally connected and that every individual is unique.

the moon with mars in her arms is a brilliant collection from an original poet. In this, her eleventh book of poetry, Zonailo moves from her west coast origins, through her years of living in Montreal, to become a citizen of the world. She invites us to join her in seeing the human condition with greater clarity and compassion.

Front cover art: “Moon Shadow,” monoprint by Ottilie Douglas.
Back cover art: Portrait of CZ, charcoal drawing by Monique Patenaude, Montreal Old Port, 2005.

Critical Praise for the moon with mars in her arms

“A finalist in the A.M. Klein Poetry Prize for her collection The Goddess in the Garden, Carolyn Zonailo....presents a delicately rendered yet powerful vision of the feminine essence Sophia, or spiritual wisdom, embodied in the metaphor of the moon. In her striving to unify nature and spirit, Zonailo takes the reader through the various ’lunar’ phases that trace a movement from a kind of spiritual darkness, or eclipse, to full light or vision."”

Nola Accili, The Pacific Rim Review of Books

“Zonailo’s poetry caringly offers another locale, one of acceptance, and loving response. Delicately, yet with the surprising strength of waving, watery kelp, [the section] Desire directs our attention to a wide, airy, and brave interior passage, deep inside the cave of the self, not narcissistically but courageously. Very courageously. Poetry is the speedo-meter Zonailo uses to measure time: not only her time, but all time, universal time. Poetry is her largest oxygenating vein through which utterance occurs. ”

Eleanor Cowan, The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter