Compendium, review by Douglas Barbour, Edmonton Journal

     Carolyn Zonailo is a lyric poet in the best traditional sense.

     As the poems of Compendium show, she writes of love as Sappho did, directly and with understated grace. Early in the book, she asks, “How to survive/ the ancients?/How to sing new language?” Yet she writes best, perhaps, when she writes in the ancient language, but manages to get it right, as in “A Book of Flowers” and “Compendium”, two sequences of pure lyric speech.

     In the lovely poem, “The Moon”, the speaker says to her lover, “I want the moon,/your hand,//the moon's light/illuminating this room.//I want, as well,/the mystery//of that illumination.” At their best, Zonailo's poems achieve her desire. In their spare purity, they lyrically illuminate the mystery of love.

Copyright by Douglas Barbour: www.carolynzonailo.com, 2004.