Issue 152 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

One of the things I like about Anne Compton's poems is the broad range of knowledge they contain. Her description of the female ghosts on the North Shore of P.E.I. could apply to her too: "What they know must be as limitless as the sea."

Compton is a seasoned and accomplished poet who has waited a long time to publish her first book. The result has been well worth the wait. Opening the Island is an exciting and imaginative collection.

The first section of the book and the last are devoted to exploring Prince Edward Island, the province where she was raised.

"On the return ferry, the visitors say, it
    reminded me
so much of Ireland, the lowlands,
    Camelot, some place
I've been or dream I've been
    ... lending library to the restive,
hospitable
    to loss
open, an opening."

Her poems "are" an opening - to the past, to lives lived, but also to lives one hopes may yet be lived. Because Compton is skilled in rhythm, sound, nuance, music breaks through her poems and saturates them like waves tumbling on the island shore she describes so well. The last stanza of "What Land Means: Autumn 1998," a eulogy she wrote for her brother, is an example of such music:

"we planted you
on the down slope of a hill: Advantage to all your acres,
a family loam richest in you, Great Tree. Hold me
in view. Wait at the bottom till I coast to you.
We'll climb up together. Into green branches."

Through these poems we come to know what her life was like when she was a child and the vivid atmosphere of her home. In a few short lines, she is able to make her world familiar to us, however foreign from our own. "My father did everything, was everything - lord of our lives - a cursing, gentle man. / He could parse and he could scan, line a psalm, recite a poem, build a barn. For him we took each meal in silence / eleven children ..." Hers was "a life banked against winter."

Section 2, "Women Writing Men," in which references are made to historical, literary and iconic figures, is the most demanding section but the careful reader is rewarded with lovely surprises. The Guenevere who speaks in "Guenevere Writes to Them Who Wrote Of Her" is not the Guenevere portrayed by Lord Tennyson. Compton admonishes him as well as Sir Thomas Malory and William Morris. "Blame me not for that. No more did I betray / the goodly King: his heart was not given .... What God bestows, He intends," Guenevere informs us, offering an innovative interpretation of her relationship with Lancelot and with the King.

Compton's perspective varies from Tennyson's as well, as she addresses his work in her poem "Tidying the Tower: The Lady of Shalott without Tennyson." Unlike Tennyson's gentle Launcelot, Compton's Lady of Shalott says of him, "his unbearable light put out the world ... the sight of him cracked my gaze."

Referring to the blue water she saw in the mirror, the heroine of the poems says: "it must have been a trick of the light, effect of distance / in here it's more like grey and ever so swift."

Her unconventional sonnet "Letter to France" is intriguing in its mystery and innuendo. "She wrote to him on St. Crispin' Day" the poem begins, and proceeds to utilize the cadence and tone of the time it depicts. Listen to its music:

"We who belong to you will be as the mist and the rain
everywhere unsettled, subtle, until
the Sun returning dispel disgrace ..."

In the third section, which includes homages to paintings, her precision and insights are dazzling. About Claude Monet she writes that he: "Taught us to see tender blue in the darkest shadow.... Awakening / us to light born vanishings, / your impression / emptied the cathedral of custom."

"Lightwork in Vermeer" is another stunning lyric. "The spoken and unspoken being the same in this light," Compton writes. The poem ends: "By the windows of Vermeer, light is suspensive." She has chosen the perfect word to leave the reader suspended in Vermeer's world. Such precision epitomizes Compton's poetry. We cannot quite leave the world she takes us into, or lose the taste of ocean salt, even after we've closed the book on her sea and land and people.

There is humour in her work as well. In the poem "Features," a modern day Helen of Troy responds to the following personal ad: "Senior widower requires woman to cook and clean house .... Must own boat and motor. Please send photo of boat."

Some of the poems could have been edited more completely, such as "The Dinner Party," which would have been stronger had the last stanza, a summary of earlier stanzas, been omitted. But this is a minor complaint and does not diminish the pleasure of the book.