Body Grief
by Sandy McKinney. 
The Bromley Bookstore
Paper. $12.00
ISBN 0-9743157-0-2

ith a new poetry book in my hands, I tend to dip into pages at random at first, rather than read from first page to last. With Sandy McKinney's collection, I felt like Jack Horner presented with a whole pieful of plums: the bag of groceries carried "high and defiantly, like something about to be born;" the lizard with "coral parchment throatskin;" leaves "like little hands about to be let go';" a yellow dog "sprawled so motionless it might have fallen from the sky."

The book consists of 4 sections: A Shifting Sky, Portraits, Body Grief and Songs for Dionysos. Here are poems about home and travel, animals, people, the loss of a child, the sea, mythology and fairy—tale, and uniting all the themes, there is the voice, wise and incisive.

Who cannot respond, for instance, to the haunting image of grief as something that must be held in cupped hands because "there is no surface on which it can rest" ?

I felt I was taken on a journey, saddened sometimes, exhilarated at others, but always carried along by the author's wonderful use of language and unfailing poetic craft.

As Sandy writes: "Whatever we find is never what we were looking for" —but in every one of these poems there is something worth finding. This is an essential book for your poetry shelf.

© Margaret Griffiths