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The Goddess in the Garden
Carolyn Zonailo
Ekstasis Editions
Victoria, B.C.
2002

Finalist, A.M. Klein Poetry Award.

This is the garden of the Great Mother Goddess, where the drama of the dynamic relationships—between women (in the roles of daughter, mother, sister); and between women and men (as friends and lovers)—cast a revealing light on what is known as Paradise. A compelling new volume from an important voice in Canadian poetry, The Goddess in the Garden combines mystical insight and sensual language to evoke a timeless meadow where humans and deities play out eternal passions. We're back in the
garden but something's changed...

Front cover sculpture: Reclining Woman, by Mona Rutenberg, 1995, fiberglass and resin, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Critical Praise for The Goddess in the Garden

"Carolyn Zonailo's best poems are filled with fierce honesty, revealing truths at the archetypal heart of what it means to be fully alive as mother, daughter, lover, and ultimately, human being. The Goddess in the Garden is a book in which the pain of memory echoes sharply through the tight lines of one of Canada's strongest contemporary poets. Zonailo's poems achieve lyric grace in unaffected celebration of life's daily activities and in homage to the power and intimacy of erotic love."

Trevor Carolan, author of Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg at Hollyhock

"Carolyn Zonailo's poems strike an open, sincere tone. Each line is alive. Her writing in The Goddess in the Garden burns through to brilliance. These are poems that, like first thoughts, come from an unknown source—in order to awaken and energize us."

Ilona Martonfi, The Yellow Door, Montreal, Quebec

“The book has a lovely achieved-after-struggle feeling, from the conflicts of the nest situation in part one to the serenity and acceptance of the later poems. Reading over many of the poems, they remind me of D.H. Laurence’s sequence ‘Look We Have Come Through’…and Zonailo’s poems are sensuous and conversational, like his. The simple, often domestic erotic details in the poems in The Goddess in the Garden are like Lawrence, too.”

Jean Mallinson, Ph.D., West Vancouver, B.C.