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The Wide Arable Land
Carolyn Zonailo
Caitlin Press
Vancouver, B.C.
1981

First full length collection of poetry by West Coast poet Carolyn Zonailo. Contains lyric and prose poems, a sequence of eight sonnets, and four long poems. Includes the major work, “Journey to the Sybil” which was performed by Zonailo with jazz pianist Al Neil and percussionist Howard Broomfield at the Robson Square Theatre (Vancouver), The Optica Gallery (Montreal), and The Music Gallery (Toronto).

Critical Praise for The Wide Arable Land

“…at its best it offers poems of great lyric beauty and subtlety. Especially fine is the closing sequence, ‘Journey to the Sibyl’, in which Zonailo is able to bring together mythic or surreal symbols with the observed details of a local landscape…Zonailo is clearly on the verge of becoming an important B.C. poet.”

Stephen Scobie, Books in Canada

“…she is capable of writing some wonderfully spare, rhythmic poems. The best of these owe something to Williams, perhaps, but there is nothing derivative about them.”

Bruce Whiteman, The Fiddlehead

“Gardens and landscape have long been popular subjects for poetry…Pope, Keats, and Tennyson furthered the image, while modern poets like Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Auden translated the garden into contemporary metaphors. Now a young Canadian poet, Carolyn Zonailo, joins that tradition in her new collection, entitled The Wide Arable Land.”

Ira Nadel, CBC Radio

“The title of Carolyn Zonailo’s book The Wide Arable Land is apt in view of the poetry she writes. The phrase is taken from John Keats, but the image is very much a part of Zonailo's poetic landscape: soft, loamy, and full of possibilities.”

Len Gasparini, The Vancouver Sun