Hooking

The poet’s fifth collection is a series of centos that, on one level, draw inspiration from a traditional Newfoundland craft. Like a hooked rug made up of strips of fabric cut from old clothes, the cento is stitched together from lines scissored out of other poems. Dalton’s centos range across continents and epochs, rummaging among poems contemporary and canonical in celebration of the combinatory energies of language. As her lines hook together syntactically and emotionally, they create a striking music, by turns subtle, startling, and dazzling.

Mary Dalton is a poet and the author of Merrybegot and Red Ledger. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the E. J. Pratt and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry, Pat Lowther, and Winterset Awards. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.