The right words

New book of poems reflects upon life on the south shore

When JC Sulzenko was approaching the end of a 25-year career with the government, she came to the realization that despite all the effort she had put into it, that career was really not her life’s work. She yearned for something more. “It was a terrible moment for me, really, and I didn’t know what to do,” she says. Sulzenko turned to her passion for writing, which had long lain dormant. At first, she penned letters to the editor of local and national newspapers, then she wrote stories and poems for children. “I began to do extraordinarily surprising things for me. In the most recent part of my refocusing, I focused on poetry for a general readership, and I think that I rediscovered myself in doing this.”

The culmination of that effort is a slim volume of poetry titled South Shore Suite, published by Brian Flack of Point Petre Publishing here in the County. The book takes its title from the first of four sections that comprise the work. That first section had its genesis in a promise that Sulzenko made to post a line of poetry on her website every day. These were poems that drew from her experiences in the County and touch upon various aspects of life on the south shore, from the observation of wind and weather through her window overlooking the bay, to bird-banding, to the environmental threat posed by wind turbines. The second section provides a wider view of the natural world, not limited to the County, and the third section is an anthology of poems written based on a series of interviews. The fourth section strikes closest to Sulzenko’s heart. It follows the cycle of life and touches upon the intimate moments of love, grief and loss.

The poems are all in written in free verse. Some are in the Japanese form of tanka, a fiveline poem with a set number of syllables, others are in haiku, and some of the longer ones combine the forms. “For me, what’s important is that I write as I hear something,” says Sulzenko. “It comes to me as if I hear it first and then I write it down and I spend time making sure I’m doing the best job I can. I try to be very direct and yet be very compressed, because poetry is a compression of thought. Coleridge said—and I’ve always loved this definition—that poetry is the best words in the best order.”

The poems do not occupy much space on the pages. There is plenty of white space, with some pages containing a mere dozen words over three lines. Yet despite the sparseness, the words are dense with meaning and warrant careful consideration to plumb their depths. This is a book whose lightness is not a measure of its gravity, which is not to say that there aren’t light-hearted moments—” A Fall sun brings Riesling”—but there is also the line “she wears her conduct like a scar.”

Sulzenko will formally launch the book with a reading in the Lipson Room above Books & Company on Saturday, November 18 from 4 to 6 p.m. A loonie from the sale of each book during the session will be donated to the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory.