Actualities

by Monica Kidd

Gathered from its authors wide-ranging experience, Monica Kidds debut collection includes local legends and personalities, imagined scenarios based on found photographs, lamentations and confessions of love, lyrical studies of medical anomalies, and landscape portraits. Kidds deft imagery and songlike stride render her subjects in striking, familiar gestures that bring the reader alongside her gait and into her minds eye.

The collection opens with a series of poems that tell stories from Kidds adopted home in Newfoundland. A drowning, a shipwreck, a community referendum, an abandoned town, a birthday party and other landmark events are relayed in a fashion that relies less on strict narrative account than on associative brush strokes. Infusing her subjects with emblematic strength, Kidd resurrects family tragedies, nights of revelry and community politics in coastal towns.

Found is a collection of photographs purchased from a second-hand store in Winnipeg and paired with Kidds imaginative translations of their black-and-white foregrounds into full-colour memories. In one photo a woman surveys a snow-covered field, in another three young girls at the beach squint into the sun. How they got there, where they are going, and the expectations surrounding the captured moment are the poets invention.

Actualities closes with a sequence of Field Notes written during Kidds stay at a biology station on Lake Opinicon in southern Ontario. The notes address fields, woods, ponds, night skies and thunder storms, brought to the page with the country lilt and painterly memory that mark Kidds work throughout the collection.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

58 pages, Paperback

First published August 20, 2007

About the author

Monica Kidd is an award-winning journalist specializing in science and health reporting, and a multidisciplinary writer. She is the author of eight books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Reviews

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Includes some beautiful poems. I especially liked "Dry" and "My Next Lover Will Appreciate Carrots."