Canadian Poetry; Wet Ink Books; Canada; Canadian Literature; publishing; www.WetInkBooks.com; Devour; Devour: Art & Lit Canada; Find all of our mags; “Devour” and “The Ambassador” –www.issuu.com/richardgrove1/stacks/bc11ecdd1e7646c4b1fac2bb7aef11ef

 

Kimberley Elizabeth Sherman Grove

 

 
Canadian Poetry; Hidden Brook Press; Canada; Canadian Literature; publishing; www.hiddenbrookpress.com; Devour; Devour: Art & Lit Canada; Find all of our mags; “Devour” and “The Ambassador” –www.issuu.com/richardgrove1/stacks/bc11ecdd1e7646c4b1fac2bb7aef11ef
 

 

 

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A Review of Kimberley Sherman Grove’s Poetics
Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias

 

One read of Kimberley Sherman Grove´s poetry was all it took to captivate me and stir clear-cut images in my mind. I instantly called her “The Lady of the Video-words.”

Talking to her was also an experience to cherish. The woman and the poet are one. She has an aura of sweetness and calmness that envelops you. I said: “Kim is a gentle Canadian flower, sweet, calm, knowledgeable. She pays attention to your words with committed, welcoming eyes that give you peace and make you feel so comfortable.”

She lives with her husband, Richard Marvin Grove (Tai) on the shore of Lake Ontario in Presqu’ile Provincial Park, where they run a bed and breakfast for artists, writers and birders. The park is a great influence on her perception of the Canadian landscape. She walks out her back door into her poetry. I was lucky to read a collection of her poems, The Poetry of Kim Grove, compiled for the Canada Cuba Literary Alliance Cultural Festival in Santiago de Cuba in January-February 2010.

What I perceived was poetry as an extension of Kim’s sensitive heart. She chooses her words carefully and holds them as a painter does with a brush: images spark out of it, flooding the reader’s eyes. She is in love with nature, a theme deeply rooted in Canadian writers, but there is also the human presence as a beholder, or as a component of the picture.
When you read Kim’s poetry you can feel a serene pat on your shoulder that registers in your brain thanks to what she offers: snowflakes of silence and quiet or white-vapor scurry-offs, or muffled hoof and paw sounds. We watch idyllic landscape movies she gives birth to and gently taps into computer video-words.

In “Nature’s Needlepoint” she plays with images and sounds: “As the rumbling thunder like distant fireworks.” Further below, Kim goes beyond by activating all senses: “Bright yellow daffodils worship the sun, while lilacs perfume the air. Roses, lilies and tulips sew more colour into the fabric.” Spring is personified, in an intimate harmony of poet and nature: “She adds the hundreds of leaves that will crumple underfoot like worn paper bags. She applies some final touches, blowing away unnecessary edges or redoing ugly patches.”

Nature is the protagonist. We also see the perfectionist in Kim Grove, the dreamer who can gild the view to ultimate exquisiteness. “Like worn paper bags” is a simile the poet handles so the reader, a stranger maybe, understands the natural wonders using a more “social” acoustic explanation, that of paper bags. Yet, Kim is not a stranger to her scenes; she is the messenger, the bridge that brings together nature and society. The tools are in her hands: she applies dabs across the canvas laid out before her: light slaps, gentle taps, fluorescent strokes that unfold the landscape for us, mesmerized “viewers.”

In “White Menagerie,” the poet takes pictures or videos the scenes: menagerie swaying with the gentle icicle breeze or posing photographically vulnerable to the poet’s sensitiveness and sharp eye.
There are oozing shadows and damp fleeting noises in the movies that she wondrously edits and reedits so winter is no longer unknown to one’s eyes. Kim has collected it in cozy glass igloos tenderly allowing the sleet to shower them with tidbits of frost that the reader feels. She marvels at the place she describes, and we marvel at the way she introduces her “explorer.” She reaches up to kiss the man amidst a glorious setting, again the simile to fuse nature and society, “Creaking like Styrofoam under our feet,” this time accompanied by onomatopoeia, “creaking.”
“His Creativity” opens and closes with excellent lines. It is the apparently simple description of an intimate moment. It speaks between the lines of a gentle, sentient, valuing heart. “His creativity was in a fragile moment” is a euphemism that reveals the poet’s state of mind.

The intricate, sometimes infinite paths of love are explored in “Falling in Love.” The poet knows she will “slip off this thing” that is the red balloon of love, and complains she “should have got off a long time ago.” But there she is, clinging to hope, to the experience, even in the dark notion that it all might take her to “have to live on a far off planet alone.”
She is willing to take the risk anyway, so it seems.

Questions pop up: How and why did she get on the balloon in the first place? Isn’t falling in love a human thing we must never give up, must strive for as many times as is necessary, and are entitled to?

In “Snow” the writer refocuses on one of her favorite motifs, nature. The poem stands on a simile: “like huge eiderdown pillows.” I had already mentioned that Kim is able to translate into images what winter is. This poem continues the “didactic” endeavor of the poet, successfully. The “illusion of sugar covering the earth” reinforces my assumption of the sweetness in the poet´s heart and her penmanship to find the right words for the best of comparisons.

“The Challenge” is the endless battle of the mind and the physical part, the race against oneself, the test of natural instinct versus human psyche. Among the resources the poet wisely exploits are the expressive means of the language, turned into powerful stylistic devices: understatement (“a small thumbnail of a toad”) repetition (“I´d” and “Of how…”) skillfully handled to poke the readers´ capacity for patience, placing them in the poet’s situation.

The poet defends the tranquility of the scene, the patience of the animal, as opposed to the “rush of the city,” her own impatience, and leaves it to us readers to estimate how long she could really stand the test and check how many would turn and walk away.

One of the traits of Canadian literature is the observation of nature as a divine force that comes to us in splendid manners. Kim catches these manners and gives us a handful of images in motion.
Kimberley Grove sings to her Canada, that white Canada she sees from her cottage with an artist’s eye. It is an array of images neatly, slowly, gently sketched; superb choice of words, divine success. The Lady of the Video-words has left us a gallery of images as impressive as the wondrous Canadian landscape they represent.

 

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