Breaker by Sue Sinclair


Breaker
Title : Breaker
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1894078667
ISBN-10 : 9781894078665
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 96
Publication : First published January 1, 2008

The essence, the quintessence, of lyric poetry. Sue Sinclair is the director inheritor of the great early 20th Century German poet, she possesses intense lyrical vision, steeped in wonder at the existence of the world, and a kind of grief at our inability to lose ourselves in it completely. Her perception is acutely focused and rigorous; and she is acutely self-aware. She is not afraid of words like "beauty" or "being," yet, because of the intensity of her vision, she never uses them as clichés. Her gift for metaphor is astonishing and may remind some readers of the young Roo Borson. You cross the heat-ridden ground, the sweet, brittle scent
of sage rising underfoot. So easy to pretend a single word
will occur to you, and that it will do all the good
anyone could hope. The earth is parched and lonely,
relies on dignity to protect it. Each thing hanging
by the thread of itself. Bleating crickets. Rustle of dry stalks.
The silence pushes you toward
It's time to walk deep into the heart of what troubles you.
- from "Drought" "In these poems, 'the world lifts its head/and clarity pours from its back.' The world-reading in Sue Sinclair's Breaker, the ontology of the book, is magical and feels deeply true. All objects here exercise the power of a profound affective gravity; cities, islands, gardens and the savouring mind itself pull and accommodate the one who looks hard. Sinclair's poems shape us to be just this sort of fierce viewer. They have a moving, extraordinary facility to discern, taste, the sweet depths of things."- Tim Lilburn

Breaker Reviews

  • B. Morrison

    This is the third book of poetry from the Toronto-based Sinclair, though the first one I’ve read. Or rather, immersed myself in, since I’ve read and reread it, set the book aside for a few months, and read it again. Poets are often advised to go deeper, to make space for more profound meaning to emerge. Sinclair’s poems show me how far short of that goal I’ve fallen. They disturb and entrance me. They make me look at the things of this world in a new way.

    In talking about the difference between design and art, Milton Glaser says “. . . the only purpose of art is that it is the most powerful instrument for survival—art is so persistent in all our cultures because it is a means of the culture to survive. And the reason for that, I believe, is that art, at its fullest capacity, makes us attentive.. . . if you look at a work of art, you can re-engage reality once again, and you see the distinction between what you thought things were and what they actually are. Because of that, it is a mechanism for the species to survive.”

    Sinclair’s poems are truly art, then.

    Continue reading at
    http://bmorrison.com/blog/304/breaker...

  • John Hanson

    I'll call myself a new poetry reader and a new poet as well.

    I listened to Sue read this March, and I was overpowered by the images she created and feelings she sturred in me. I bought this book hoping to experience more of the same.

    I can't say it succeeded, at least not fully. As I spent April writing at least a poem a day, studying poetry, and reading a couple of poems from this book each day, I found myself growing away from her work and towards a more concrete, Germanic style. Still, each poem in here takes me to places I've never been before, and I feel good about that. I think her work can be desribed as a balance between concrete details and abstractness. I find abstractness difficult to read, hers difficult to read, yet it paints scenery from a distance that I always seem to focus on in the end. I suspect it might be a male-female difference or a left-right brain thing.