New Titles in Poetry

In the Key of Red
Author: Eva Tihanyi
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Paper $18.95 (84 p.)
ISBN-13: 9781926708164
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In the Key of Red is Tihanyi's sixth book of poetry, and her best so far. It is tempting to call these poems a collection of jewels, but that phrase doesn't describe the organic quality of this collection, a struggle with the growth of understanding, with the development of different perspectives. Better to describe them with one of the author's own rich images, such as this one from "How it Happens": "…poplar leaves catching the light like green jewels".

Tihanyi writes about her relationships, erotic and otherwise, and about art. She has crafted interior poems, taking her own emotional pulse, while never losing her physical surroundings. She finds correspondence between her deep feelings and the physical world, so that inside and outside inform each other. Birdsong and seeds, flowers and leaves, water and earth, keep light inside her poems, reminders of a natural rhythm that steadies her in moments of fulfillment or of loss. The reader needs this sense of balance too, as the swings between the joy of love, and the bitterness of its unraveling and ending, are sharp and sudden in revelation. The fruit of the struggle is an equilibrium that is able to accept loss as inevitable, the dark to the light, the night to the day, as part of a cycle that will not end with loss.

Only a highly skilled poet can capture as Tihanyi does the ghost of art—whether in painting, in sculpture, or in writing—as it materializes. In poems such as "The Artist at Work", and "Interpretation", the line between the experience of creation and thing created is deliberately and wonderfully blurred, making the reader lean in close, trying to understand how it's done. Later, there's the re-reading, trying to understand how Tihanyi works this fascination.

Tihanyi's lines are spare but not quickly read, loaded as they are with emotional freight. They work on the reader like haiku, elegant, glimmering lines that dart into the heart through the eye, or the ear: "…the hours drone on, the seconds click like camera shutters" (from "Labour Day"). The smallest of these poems have power because of their brevity in combination with a gravity of tone (where she is ironic, she mourns rather than jests). Yet most amazing are the longer poems, as Tihanyi begins with a simple metaphor and dares to extend it, as she does in "The End of Something", until the reader aches from the stretching.