Poetry
Robert Crawford
Lyrical yet laced with more than a hint of menace, these subtly cadenced poems register with intense precision moments of parting and recognition. Amanda Merritt's first collection establishes her as deftly alert to hurt and beauty, and as a compelling new voice in Canadian poetry.
John Burnside
The Divining Pool by Amanda Merritt unites restless and edgy inventiveness with a sense of the classical that seems to me rare in a first collection. This is the rich, tender, carefully crafted work of a poet who dares to soar, in the sure confidence that should she fall, she has the imaginative gifts to document the enterprise in poignant detail.
Justina Elias
The Divining Pool by Amanda Merritt opens with a suicide and a rebirth; the pool here is one of blood, opaque yet restorative. Drawing from Greek and Christian myth, the collection explores the generative power of sacrifice: these are poems in which women birth themselves (and their art) through their own foreheads—an effort that, despite their best attempts to conceal it, always leaves a scar. Imprisoned by mirrors, the speakers break free from the stasis of performative femininity by splitting their own bodies; bones here are knives and the doors they crack open, phallus and yoni. To live as a muse—“like a marble block/his own Pieta”—comprises both solidity and the dissolution of self; to cup one’s own heart like a baby’s head is to trade stability for depth, a process no less emptying. Yet the inevitability of loss haunts these poems, whose melting candles and slabs of meat marry romance and transience. It is in their embrace of emptiness—“the dark casing around stars”—that the speakers fill their private voids, close their wounds with words.