THE GAZETTE

June 15, 2009

In her recent book Paper Oranges (Signature Editions, 112 pages, &14.95), Montreal poet Carolyn Marie Souaid celebrates the transformative power of words and the creative act itself. She begins her poem Afterword by lamenting our inevitable decline:

Closer to death, we become Earth sipping the dregs

in the bottom drawer: soup bowl of doddering swans, the last sour grapes

from a vine.

In its second stanza, though, the poem turns; the poet recognizes that as long as the creative spirit persists, she has power to write “a singing epilogue,” which, in its affirmation of the life force, is reminiscent of the conclusion of Tennyson's Ulysses or Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium:

Think. Where would we be without drive, without verve,

this moored light waiting in the heart?

 

-Harold Heft