Indicative of the title, the poems in All This range from the conventional lyric/narrative that captures an intense moment of emotion, an epiphany glimpsed briefly out of the corner of the eye, to the more experimental. Some of the poems use intertextuality, language from other works, to explore meaning, perception, and layers of experience. Others play with language, letting it lead into unexpected places, exploring new terrain. In a few, placement on the page conveys the feel of musical notation and phrasing, the page a theatre where the interaction of language makes meaning rather than recreates a remembered event. At times, words in a poem are treated as paint and the sheet of paper as an expressionistic canvas.
Praise for All This…
Aaron Schurin, former Director of USF’s MFA program and former Associate Director of the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University, is the author of numerous books of poetry, including: Into Distances, The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems, A Door, Involuntary Lyrics, Citizen, and volumes of prose, including Unbound: A Book of AIDS, and King of Shadows, a collection of essays. He says, “There’s a restlessness to Lily Iona Mackenzie’s poetry that might properly be called ‘curiosity’—the eye alert in its socket, the ear straining to register. ‘The vaults// of syllables’ pour out their riches: a delectation of sky, a rampage of color, the sweet sting of mortality. From Mendocino to the Sea of Marmara to the Mexican highlands, these poems are afoot in the Whitman sense, and wonderfully ‘chewy’—deeply figured and sonically dense. Or let’s say they sink their teeth into experience, lap it right up, ‘night splitting/ open and spilling// its milk.’ In other words, what we have here is poetic sustenance.
Dean Rader teaches at the University of San Francisco in the Department of English, where he has also served as Dean of Humanities. Rader is also a published poet. His poem “Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934” won the Sow’s Ear Review poetry prize in 2009. His debut poetry collection, Works and Days, won the 2010 Truman State University T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Works & Days was also named a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial First Book Award, and it won the Writer’s League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. He says, “The poems in Lily Iona MacKenzie’s All This are an engrossing atlas of both geographical and emotional landscapes. They move from Canada to California, from the body to bereavement, from poetry to politics, from loss to love and back again. These innovative poems resonate because, miraculously, their topographies feel both familiar and new. We love living in them.”
Review of All This:
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What makes All This so special is how it captures the beauty of perception itself. MacKenzie’s writing reveals how language can be both a mirror and a mystery inviting us to look deeper, to listen closer. It’s the kind of collection you’ll return to again and again, discovering new meanings each time.
For lovers of poetry that challenges, comforts, and awakens the senses, All This is a treasure. It reminds us that poetry isn’t just words it’s life unfolding on the page.
All This is available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/All-This-Lily-Iona-MacKenzie/dp/1935656112
Youtube video of book launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IClbwdPSGqg
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