Mark Her Words

Forget polite verse Mary Dalton wants you to feel the salt and soil of Newfoundland

- NICHOLAS BRADLEY

LATE IN HIS CAREER, the English poet W. H. Auden distilled the whole business of poetry into three pungent lines: "A poet's hope: to be,/like some valley cheese,/ local, but prized elsewhere." Think Appenzeller or Raclette. Such names are known high and low, the flavours often imitated, but in each case, the real thing belongs to one place and one place only.

I say this with the utmost deference: Mary Dalton is a valley cheese. A consummate poet, she is eminently local, her terroir the idioms and folkways of Newfoundland. Although she has been recognized over the past thirty-five years, her bracing poetry is overdue for widespread acclaim. Inseparable from the easternmost province, it deserves to be read here, there, and everywhere.

Dalton's new book, Interrobang, is named for an awkward bit of punctuation that combines a question mark and an exclamation point. Betwixt and between, fundamentally ironic, it's the typographical equivalent of WTF; in one poem, Dalton dubs it the "prince of ambivalence." The interrobang muddles neat distinctions, fusing doubt and certainty, success and error. The title tells us that Dalton's poems ask questions and make statements all at once-as good poems, like riddles, tend to do. Sixty years ago, the critic Northrop Frye proposed that "Where is here?" was the "riddle" at the heart of a "Canadian sensibility." Dalton loves riddles, but her poems are sure of at least one thing: here is an island in the North Atlantic.