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Atmospherically light and stylistically expansive poems that regard our givens as a gift.
Don McKay's description of The Pearl King and Other Poems, Catherine Greenwood's wonderful first book, also apply to The Lost Letters: "With discerning wit and a large range of styles and voices, she holds up each subject for contemplation as though it were a pearl..."
At the centre of The Lost Letters is a sequence of radically diverse poems based on the story of Heloise and Abelard, truly lovers in a dangerous time, the twelfth century. The raw material is heavy, tension between flesh and spirit being the serious issue carried forward from the twelfth century into the twenty-first. But Greenwood's deft and delicate handling of scenarios of love requited but balked becomes a perceptive reading—extraordinarily inventive and constantly surprising of contemporary secular society.
The Lost Letters creates a world of wonder tinged with sadness on behalf of so much that goes unnoticed, whether it's a bin of severed sows' ears, a lizard tethered by its tail who severs it by self-amputation, or a down-and-out old schoolmate.
Catherine Greenwood's poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies; her first book, The Pearl King and Others (Brick Books, 2004), was a Kiriyama Prize notable book. She works for British Columbia's Ministry of Justice in Victoria, where she lives with her husband, the writer Steve Noyes.