Beryl Baigent, Welsh-born Canadian poet, has sent a review of my first collection of poems Imagining the Full Hundred. I am very grateful to her. What follows is the review. Thank you very much, Beryl.
Owen, Fiona. IMAGINING THE FULL HUNDRED. Caernarfon, North Wales: Gwasg Pantycelyn (2003). ISBN 1-903314-60-7. Cover Illustration: Malcolm Strongetharm.
Fiona Owen is a poet who resides in Llanfaelog, Anglesey. This beautiful green book with a meditative face of a head-covered woman, sets the tone for her first published volume. The book’s title originates in David Hart’s poem “The snail sets out up the steps.” Fiona’s book title also graces her five-part poem sequence (40) which conveys the deeper message of her work by using an epigrammatic quotation from Gandhi: “I want to realize identity with all life,/ even with such things as crawl upon the earth.” The poet is affirming her own affinity with all living creatures and one may understand the “full hundred” as the Wan Wu, or Ten Thousand Things, of Taoist philosophy. Here we find insects tumbling out of petals during the making of elderflower cordial; bees and ladybirds, a brown mongrel dog, all experience annihilation when a child is treated to ” pictures of Armageddon, when God/ punishes the sinners; ” slugs, worms, wood lice, beetles, and snails are “a community in crisis.”
This central sequence is enfolded by poems which journey from sandy images of the Middle East, where the poet lived from the age of three to sixteen, to the green mountains of North Wales. Fear and dread, where lives of humans and animals coalesce in importance, whether it as a non-swimming mother in the ocean, or a old oil drum full of “not quite dead” dogs, or a scorpion “making its clinging way across the ceiling,” fill the earlier poems with emotion and trauma as the transience of life is explored. The poet identifies with Earth itself in order to empathizes with the suffering of nature. In the form of Rock, which/who expresses how it “fancies the movement of bird,” that is, until an earthquakes puts in an appearance. This poem, along with others, attests to the innocence of nature and to the writer as an integral part of it. Pablo’s incident in the shallows when he was stung by a stonefish (14) demonstrates the impartiality of nature. The poet accepts the natural way, as nature does what it is intended to do and nothing more or nothing less, and life continues to flow.
The unassuming simplicity of Fiona’s language in these poems makes her work accessible to all. Some will no doubt read the ‘stories’ and enjoy the narrative, and others will delve deeper and unearth the philosophy of one who writes because this is her ‘nature.’ And by her writing she blesses all things, from insects to people, from plants to moons, and accordingly she salutes the sacredness of the universe. Her poems are love poems in the mystical tradition. The divine is present in all things, she is reminding us. It is because of this divine energy that one may transmute and take on the characteristic of other aspects of nature. Thus, “When you shave / you make / your top lip shape / into a beak.” The shaver can apparently make a “bird-face” at will but it is not often that one gets to understand why or how (22). In another incident the beard becomes “a forest / [she] loses herself in” while the protagonist is “lunar / lying among roots / and leaves” (23).
Fiona shares with her readers the mysteries of the universe. The moon, for example, can do anything that humans can do and in a poem titled “Moondance” lightens the incredibly serious philosophy the writer is expounding, with unpretentious and original humour. We are aware of the moon dancing and trailing “fingers along the banister” and becoming the Peeping Tom and listening to the private encounter (24). This poem also expresses the alchemical and Hermetic dictum “As above so below,” so none of the significance is lost in the humour.
Fiona Owen demonstrates clarity in her thoughts, uniqueness in her metaphors, and humour and freshness in her poetic imagery. In the penultimate poem of Imagining the Full Hundred, the poet fits it all into a nutshell: “All forms are possible / at every instance. / No shape is an outcast / the mind need only accept” (60). Life ‘just is’ and one could say the same about these poems. Each is complete in itself, each is doing its own work, each poem is a fragile and transcendent moment in an impartial universe.
Beryl Baigent October 1, 2007
