Red Ledger

My review of Mary Dalton's new book, Red Ledger, is now online at Quill & Quire.

I've been a big fan of Dalton's work since reading her taut little sequence of dialect monologues, Merrybegot. She has developed one of the most individual voices in contemporary poetry, steeped in tradition and true to the local. It's not something I expected, after reading her second book, Allowing the Light, which is a decent collection, well-crafted, etc., but nothing to knock your socks off. There really was a quantum leap between it and Merrybegot, although there were kernels of it showing in the earlier work; a couple of the poems in Merrybegot, which came out about ten years after its predecessor, were originally published in Allowing the Light, and a few of the poems in Red Ledger are also drawn from her two early books.

We've got an excellent review of Red Ledger coming up in the next issue of Canadian Notes & Queries, written by Mark Callanan.

Some other Dalton stuff on the web:

A couple of poems from Merrybegot

A review of Merrybegot

Another

Books in Canada review of Merrybegot at amazon.ca (for some reason, it's not available on the BiC website)

A trialogue review of Merrybegot I did with John MacKenzie and Steven Laird at Bookninja

A review of the audio recording of Merrybegot

A review of Red Ledger

An interview with Dalton at CBC