The Wide Arable Land, review by Stephen Scobie, Books in Canada

     Carolyn Zonailo's The Wide Arable Land, from Caitlin Press in Vancouver, is an uneven book, but at its best it offers poems of great lyric beauty and subtlety. Especially fine is the closing sequence, "Journey to the Sibyl," in which Zonailo is able to bring together mythic or surreal symbols with the observed details of a local landscape. The Sibyl's voice, which has spoken to poets from Petronius to Eliot, echoes here in the authentic sounds of the B.C. coast:

only her voice
high in the arbutus leaves

a shriek, winter
in an old wooden building

a moan, as logs rub
against rocks

     Against this, one must set such failures as the over-extended whimsy of "The Red Camellias," or the tendency of some of the shorter lyrics to fall off into weak, generalized endings. But with this, her fifth book, Zonailo is clearly on the verge of becoming an important B.C. poet.

Copyright by Stephen Scobie: www.carolynzonailo.com, 2004.