Customer Reviews

The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making (Notable Voices)

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I am not your "typical poetry person" but this collection from Cusack Handler is awesome. It is extremely reader friendly and filled with amazing imagery that takes us through the story of her marriage. She holds nothing back and digs into private spaces that most of us would fear to go. It rivets the reader like a novel and sweeps you along the turbulance that comprises so many relationships that are too meaningful to leave but sometimes seem too painful to work through. I also read her book ,"Glorious", which is very different but equally powerful.

In these poems, the poet is wounded, but does not, cannot heal. Handler is a psychologist as well, and also much involved in poetry organizations. The wounds are not definable or familiar psychological wounds. They have to do with more than the mind or even particular situation or experience; though they are exposed usually in the context of marriage and its ties and incidents.

The style of the poems is not confessional, nor complaining. The poet does not plumb for roots or causes. The wounds are an inherent part of being alive. Not attenuated however feebly by hope, recrimination, or reason, they bring the poet extraordinary power of observation, sometimes unerring and painful in itself; but sympathy too, for herself as well as others. Often keenly aware of herself and at times seeing her circumstances and feelings like a plight, sometimes momentarily angry from the irrationality of it all, Handler nevertheless sees her wounds as vulnerabilities and a type of openness which connect her to others in her life.