The Divining Pool

by Amanda Merritt

The Divining Pool looks fearlessly into the darkest recesses of the human heart and finds a terrible beauty within it. ‘Lyrical yet laced with more than a hint of menace, these subtly cadenced poems register with intense precision moments of parting and recognition. Amanda Merritt's first collection establishes her as deftly alert to hurt and beauty, and as a compel- ling new voice in Canadian poetry.' - Robert Crawford

Genres: Poetry

55 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2018

Reviews

[Lancakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

The opening poem 'A Cure for Anxiety' is, by my estimation, the strongest of the book by far. That's not to say there aren't other really good poems in this collection (there are! and I will get to them in a sec!), but this first poem knocked my socks off and by its position Merritt and/or her editor knew what a special poem they had here, and were very correct to place it first in the book. It is a poem that I have spent many of my own poems grasping at, unknowingly. Other evidence this manuscript is impeccably structured: the final poem 'Dear,' references the same layout on the page as 'A Cure for Anxiety', nice bookending the manuscript with visual similarity.

Other standouts for me include 'An Offering for the Resurrection of a Child', 'Brother', 'A Philosophical Meditation on the Impossibility of Contact', 'The Mean Time', and 'Spring.

'Spring' is short, and for that reason all the more brilliant for its perfect capture of how I experience the season. From 'Spring':

As the phantoms wake, roused

by Earth's new anxieties, and rove

between rooms, they brandish

their ring of keys, opening windows,

blinking at the light.