There is room in this world for the serious poetry built out of timber and stone. And there is also room in this world for poetry that gathers in clouds and flutters, that is fun and fresh. Pearl Pirie’s first trade collection of poetry, Been Shed Bore, is most definitely the latter.

It plays with you, its strongest poems coming on gusts of words that sort of travel allusively around each other. Pirie’s writing also contains a wandering thread of overt, very folksy humour. Her poem Crossing the Shallow Acreage, for example, repeats the word “pickle” over and over to amusing effect. 

Or poems like Word Chain Umpteen-Eight, which begins “if you got it, flaunt, flout, pout, shout to spigots, spout to jiggers, joust.” Or Obsessively Relational with its long lists of almost-anagrams and allusive sounds: “it’s saleable, vole’s irony/ as tolls noisily bereave.” Pirie’s work is humorous, it’s catchy and it loves the outdoors.

I did notice that when Pirie’s voice drifts towards the more serious, it seems to lose its focus a little bit, to attenuate. I almost get the sense that the serious is not essentially why she writes, that she gravitates towards the looseness and joy of play with words, where she excels.

Something else bit me as I hit the two thirds-mark in this work: Every poem is different in structure, in line length, in rhythm, in tone, in devices used to write. It’s almost like I’m at a ballet but every few minutes the type of dance changes. Again, if variety is what you like, this is an excellent collection of work – but I also like it when a poet settles into a few chosen forms and explores those depths. 

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Nov 04, 2010:
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=20731