That Singing You Hear at the Edges

by Sue MacLeod

Rooted in a particular life but looking outward, these poems express a full range of emotion. In the linked section, "The Gathering Up of Each Wave Before Its Breaking," a mother, a daughter and a Cape Breton village form a story that is both personal and archetypal: a blueprint for growing up in a vast and changing world.

In That Singing You Hear at the Edges the unexpected is commonplace: "the" and "an" attend a 12-step group for codependents, the human tongue is exposed as "old amphibian," and The Angel of You Made this Mess, Lie Down rises from tangled bedsheets. MacLeod works intimately, intricately, with the power of nuance, of detail. The dividing walls of time and place remain intact but approach transparency because of what turns visible—and audible—when we become still enough to hear the singing at the edges.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003