The Wide Arable Land, review by Bruce Whiteman, The Fiddlehead

     Carolyn Zonailo's The Wide Arable Land is more successful in this respect. Like Elizabeth Gourlay's, her poems draw heavily on nature for their imagery, but Zonailo's work is tighter and is informed by a more decided sense of direction. She is occasionally guilty of a too easy calling on the gods: invocation without evocation—and sometimes she verges on sentimentality, as in "Le Cadeau," where she writes of having "watched it [a flower] grow;/ grow visibly before my wondering/ eyes." At the same time, however, she is capable of writing some wonderfully spare, rhythmic poems. The best of these owe something to Williams, perhaps, but there is nothing derivative about them:

     why, anyway, cherry
trees bloom on schedule

the season returns
on schedule
the heart continues
to pump blood

staring death
in the face
staring it down

skin peels like water
in a boat's wake

Copyright by Bruce Whiteman: www.carolynzonailo.com, 2004.