Wading the Trout River,
review by Susan Drodge, Canadian Literature
Zonailo's Wading the Trout
River speaks to the power of influence and attests to the
influence of Judeo-Christian discourse on our grapplings with
the ineffable. This collection likewise moves through four different
sections: "Geographies of the Heart," which offers a
number of memorable portraits of human compassion and vanity;
"The Male Nudes," which resurrects "the divine
masculine" from "the reckonings of our gendered selves";
"Twin Souls," which plays with notions of self, shadow,
and romantic love; and "Letters of the Alphabet," which
infuses each letter with romantic expectation and desire.
Zonailo is direct in her diction
and compassionate in her characterizations. In "Old Ladies
of Montreal," she depicts women who "have earned their
chin / whiskers or mouths where / lipstick runs over the edges,"
while in "Alex the Doorman," she mythologizes a socially
marginal character who has assumed the position of "a liminal
god, / addressing all who enter or exit."
Wading the Trout River,
however, is obscure at times in its communication of experience,
as its intimate addresses to a specific romantic partner assume
an understanding between subject and other that limits the imagery
of some of these poems. This readerly desire for more detail,
on the other hand, could signify Zonailo's ultimate success in
eliciting a voyeuristic impulse to synthesize self and other—an
impulse that seems to be the motivating force of many of her poems.
Copyright by Susan Drodge: www.carolynzonailo.com,
2004.
|
The
Wave Goddess
