Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311210214
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by DAN GRIBBIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The "shared life" in Katherine Soniat's latest volume of poetry is the\ examined life of a scrupulously cautious romantic.
With wary regard for the rhythms of nature, the speaker in these poems\ sifts the evidence for rhyme and reason in the seasons of her life with a\ growing sense that the past - her own and humankind's - is a legacy of loss,\ sadness, and misunderstanding which she, as mother, wife, and daughter must be\ willing to commit to in order to comprehend.
"Once/ I thought the past an amplitude/ I could borrow from, then set\ aside,/ like a cold store of history's passions." What she has learned is\ that there are no tidy transactions with the past.o
In "Water Translation," with the rifeness of youth upon her, the speaker\ marvels metaphorically, in rainy summer heat, at her oneness with the\ wriggling reproductive urge, "All of us loose in a summer of rainwater." But\ the daring exuberance of youth is suspect, here, in a world where loss is the\ dominant mode. In "Santa Rosa Island," it is the aching loss of a woman whose\ sailor will not return, a woman whom the speaker has longed to understand, a\ woman wandering the sand dunes of memory ~ her mother: "So the dunes become a\ map to somewhere/ her feet could not get enough of,/ a lap she kept to climb\ into,/ homesick as any child."
Soniat, who teaches at Virginia Tech, is a mature and confident poet with a\ steady eye and a sure sense of craft. "A Shared Life," her third collection,\ won a Virginia Prize for Poetry and is being published as co-winner of the 1992\ Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award. The poet's skill at suiting the image to the\ thought comes across admirably in these lines from "Routing the Maps Home," a\ poem about losses in love.
Still we believe a benevolent surf
swells to wash things back.
At night, the wind suggests it,
curling shingles, billowing
screens, changing direction
in the bent trees.
. . . . . . .
I keep holding the shrubs away
over the last footprint.
In these last two lines, in particular, we find evidence of Soniat's characteristic tension, a hesitation embedded in embrace.
Dan Gribbin, fiction editor of `Artemis,' teaches literature and film at Ferrum College.
by CNB