Undone

By Sue Goyette

Shortlisted for the 2005 Atlantic Poetry Prize, the 2005 Dartmouth Book Award and the 2005 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry

Undone is a cornucopia of passionate poems arranged into three sections. "Forgotten" has mostly to do with the aftermath of a heart-rending breakup; "Kindred" features poems on fellow artists in poetry, music and painting (ranging from Georgia O'Keeffe to Snoopy, beagle-novelist); in "Apprentice," leaving is transformed into celebration, poem after poem about fierce loving of a world that we will have to leave. In these hard-hitting, highly personal poems, lamentation is a key note. Crushing loneliness weighs heavily on the spirit. But Sue Goyette has ways of sharing pain with a compensating lift: wonderful flights of metaphor, language charged with verbal energy. "Isn’t that our job," she asks, "to coax out the light in the story?" It's a job she takes to heart and performs brilliantly.

The poems in Undone have the amplitude proper to "watching wide" -- a discipline good for seeing shooting stars and, as this book illustrates, all other kinds of light in a darkness palpable but never enveloping, not when probed so truly and sung so beautifully.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Apr 15, 2004
• ISBN: 9781771311458

Sue Goyette

Sue Goyette lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has published three books of poems, The True Names of Birds, Undone and outskirts (Brick Books) and a novel, Lures (HarperCollins, 2002). Her fourth collection of poems, Ocean, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press in 2013. She's been nominated for several awards including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther, the Gerald Lampert, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and won the 2008 CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the 2010 Earle Birney Prize and the 2011 Bliss Carman Award. Her poetry has appeared on the Toronto subway system, in wedding vows and spray-painted on a sidewalk somewhere in Saint John, New Brunswick. Sue currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University, is faculty for the Banff Wired Writing Studio and works part-time at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.