This Brighter Prison
Brick Books, London, 1993
109 pages
Set in Basque Spain, France, Greece, and her native Calgary, these poems enact journeys of the body and heart with sensuality and intelligence, catching the very texture of human experience. Sexually and morally explicit, vivid, shocking, beautiful, here is a personal and passionate language, unafraid to move to the edge of experience, both of the self and of the world observed.
In this book, Connelly probes the other side of sexual passion, questions what it means to live in a ‘new’ country and language, and interrogates the dubious comforts of home. As she moves with grace and fury between worlds, her expressiveness is both direct and dazzling.
REVIEWS
“Poems that are as swift and dangerous, sometimes, as the speedy and adventurous life from which they’ve been flung, or have flown off, like ballast or birds, just that varied in weight and trajectory and function.”
— Don Coles
“ . . . Perhaps what is so appealing about Connelly’s poems is that they present so clearly the impression of a haunted person, moving warily between the perceptions of the moment and the memories of the past, recognizing that a change of vista does not eliminate memory. Connelly’s poems are evidence that the inability to express oneself is not a failure of the language but a failure to have the vision and the command of language to make such expression possible. Instead of contemplating the meaning of meaning, Connelly writes poems that appeal to all the faculties.”
— NeWest Review, Winter 1995
“. . . The poetry of Connelly’s Spanish sojourn is remarkable for its eloquent appraisal of the relationship between poet/traveller and ciudadana. And it is the powerful women who stand out in these poems . . .”
— Hook and Ladder, Fall 1993