the weight of dew, review
Posted by Daniela Elza on Jul 13 2013
Yesterday the latest issue of the Pacific Rim Review of Books (Issue 18, Vol. 9, No. 1) dropped through my mail slot. What a pleasant surprise to read Hilary Turner’s review of the weight of dew.
I am thrilled with this review. It is amazing to read a review in which you feel seen by the reviewer.
Hopefully, I will get permission at some point to publish the whole review electronically. In the mean time you can read the whole review in Issue 18, Vol. 9, No. 1 of the PRRB.
Here are three excerpted quotes from the review.
In her second published collection, the weight of dew, she explores the BC Interior with the eyes and ears of of a traveller who is familiar with the unfamiliar, and who cannot wait to try out the sound of words in spaces where they will resonate differently, or where geography may impose a grammar of its own.
…
“…for it is word-play of a specific kind that interests Elza. As Wittgenstein famously said, “words are deeds.” Elza concurs, and adds that they can be objects too, both animate and inanimate. The plainest example of her use of this complex device occurs in ‘alternate grammars’ where the speaker discovered ‘a stylized calligraphy’ in the grass of a hillside and uses this script not merely to write her name, but to become the thing she has written.”
…
“As a shore is a kind of a line, and as a line (of verse) can shore up our knowledge of a place, these poems render their setting all the more palpable for their attention to the effects of language upon experience. The paradox is one that has preoccupied modern philosophy at least since Nietzsche, and Elza is a most philosophic traveller, leaving the place she has visited not untouched but illuminated.”
—Hilary Turner teaches English and Rhetoric at the University of the Fraser Valley.
Thank you Hilary Turner and thank you to the editors of the Pacific Rim Review of Books.