Cathedral Of The North

Passe la nuit, writes Connie Voisine in Cathedral of the North, her first magical collection of poems. The night passes—in the Acadian French of the tiny town where she grew up, as far North as the country goes) and day comes again, bringing each story closer to its conclusion, each character in the gaze of the book's clear-eyed, word haunted narrator more precisely alive. What a blessing of language and what a brilliant gift this young poet has been given—to re-see the past, its nights and days, to re-animate the present, to dream it all, night and day, into these startling poems.

Surely only in a virtuoso performance could we have stars 'tighten to teeth marks on the freezing sky,' then 'thick as salt spilled for the trees/ to lick' and finally a single 'star, resting on a branch, a ring on its hand.' They're especially moving in the service of this exploration of what it means to be among 'the unbeautiful few who can survive that far north.'

The luminous details and emotional subtleties in these poems bring to mind Alice Munro's short stories. They light the dark corners of familiar rooms, but also open onto inner and outer landscapes I feel I'm seeing for the first time. These are visionary poems in every sense of the word.

These moving and artful poems are centered by reverence: for language, for family, and for place. . . . Voisine's Cathedral of the North illuminates the distance we all inhabit.

Cathedral of the North succeeds in examining and accepting, with delicate attention, the knot of inherited love and anguish it claims as its own.

Voisine's poetry is wholly unsentimental, tactile, and filled with unexpected beauty....this is a dazzling, brave, and surprising first book.