Review of Young's Moonbathers...

... in the Winnipeg Free Press. Are they one of the ONLY metropolitan newspapers which review Canadian poetry with any regularity any more? Certainly they seem to review it MORE than any other paper I know of. Kudos and thanks due to Walker Morley and everyone at the Winnipeg Free Press who are still willing to give that most un-commercial of collections -- the poetry book -- weekly attention.

Here's the part of the review dealing with Young's Moonbathers. As far as I know this is the first review of this collection thus far, which is a bit ridiculous, considering her previous two collections received G-G shortlist nods. But t'is the way of things these days.

Free verse impressive for its rhythmic control

By: Maurice Mierau

Updated: August 24 at 12:10 AM CDT

• Print Article
• E-mail Article
• ShareThis

Victoria writer Patricia Young's ninth book of poetry, Here Come the Moonbathers (Biblioasis, 80 pages, $18) is beautifully crafted, subtle and emotionally intense.

Young's free verse is impressive for its rhythmic control. Notice the double stress pattern here, the one long line, and then the return to pattern:

Why the bone clock?

Who the bone clock?

What to say about the bone clock

except it stopped when the world was still caterwauling

tooth and claw.

Young doesn't simply produce one kind of rhythmic variation. In Twenty Questions she deploys a casual five stress line: "Dad smells of mulched leaves, something sweetly organic./ Pulverized beach shells spill from his eye sockets."

She also has a rare gift for metaphorical thinking, where a metaphor is initially somewhat mysterious, and then comes into perfectly logical focus:

Your perfect life is not a poem after all.

Which is fine except your blood is full of magnets.

You'd like to smuggle yourself out of the abandoned city

but you're stuck to the fridge... .