This week on Goodreads.com we featured a review by our Poetry Editor, Abner Porzio.
Snow Water Cove by Jeannine Savard
Simply superb from start to finish! Poet Jeannine Savard’s debut poetry collection Snow Water Cove is both pleasant and fascinating. The mastermind’s affinity with nature makes the ineffable more tangible. The elusiveness of childhood is examined realistically through nostalgia.
Savard’s colorful speakers and characters, spectacular settings, profound prefigurative language (plot), place readers in the landscapes of the soul. Locale influences the fullness of possibilities, provides wakefulness changes that prove to be transcendental. Savard’s attentiveness to imagery raises alertness. Inquiry, meditative qualms, and accurate observations render the perfectly nuance of uncertainties and certainties.
Whether it’s Savard’s speaker’s question if one can dream the same dream twice in her poem “CLASSICISM ON THE WATER,” or if it’s the respondent’s absolute certainty of disbelief, the reader can be the witness such paradoxical moments. Nor can one deny the moment flesh heals itself. This fact as well as the news of a deadly accident arrives in her poem titled “THE STITCH.” The naive child may see the world with all its innocence; however, Savard’s adult speakers make sense of caramelized identities and roles within the mythical community while exploring what it feels like to define the boundaries and limitations of returned to memories and also learned physicalities.
Savard’s eloquent style, her sophisticated descriptions unfold with deep harmonious ideas intertwined masterfully. Purified meditative lyrics can be found ever so resonating, can be heard for example in her title poem “SNOW WATER COVE”: “The blond violin resting/ In the glass case shines as no other, a face/ In wintertime lifting off a stretcher.” What cadence! Meditational poise lyrically composed, gorgeous music between the lines; elegant euphony, eloquently put language and diction heightens these poems. Also technical satisfaction can be found with Savard’s effects of not using punctuation at the end of her lines.
Some lines that I really enjoyed:
“I’ll learn/ To breathe another way just as my eyes/ Will sharpen, cut a precise line/ Wide enough for my whole body/ To slide through to the other side.”
“For acquiring the sense of something new,/ Something on the verge of becoming, and the names,/ Say, the yellow burrs of sticktight, I prize/ Will have more to do with the water they drink,/ With the steps we didn’t take, taken from us,/ Gladly.”
“The sky/ Was too blue ever to be real, overexposed/ And as thick as a wall painted over/ By generations.”
“As I stand on the shore holding the hand/ Of someone who feels like an ancestor./ We are without faces here. We are the stars/ We look at.”
Superstition Review is fortunate to have published Jeannine’s poetry twice! You can read her work in our Issue 1 and in Issue 7. Enjoy!
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