Book Review/Mary Hanna
Literary Arts Supplement
Jamaica Observer

Travelling Light by Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes.
Hamilton, Ontario: Seraphim Editions, 2006. 87 pages.

Erudite yet sensual, earnest yet playful, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes writes with the precision of a retired educator and the passion of a former nun. She is both. Her work is delicate and formal in the best modern style, imagistic and – dare I say it – difficult. It is worth probing and reading many times to reveal its hidden meanings. As with the title of this, her second book of poetry, Soutar-Hynes’s poems revel in double meanings: we can voyage unencumbered or we can move in and through incandescence – Travelling Light accommodates both endeavours and rewards both approaches to the collection.

Travelling Light is comprised of four sections, or major poems, that are refracted into roughly ten shorter poems each. The larger works are “the poetry of hands”, “mother-tongue”, “theory of knots”, and “pool of words”. The opening poem, “writing a life”, tells us in precise terms that there are no guidelines to either writing or life,

No hay camino no road
caminante - se hace one creates it
al andar as one walks

One approaches the collection in exactly this fashion, reading the breaks, becoming aware that the poet is exploring “that dark place between nearly and not yet” (“starting with Unless by Carol Shields: a found poem ii”). Soutar-Hynes is a careful reader of other people’s work and a connoisseur of art, especially luminous abstracts. She pays homage in her poems to these intellectual muses and provides a glossary at the end of the book that explains some of her references.

Immediately, it is apparent that this work is outside of the mainstream of Caribbean poetry. It reads better on the page than spoken aloud – a possibly unique feature when it comes to a Caribbean work. Perhaps this has to do with Soutar-Hynes’s long sojourn in Canada where she writes poetry and executes educational projects in Toronto. Perhaps also it is a nod to her time spent as a nun at the Mount Mercy Convent associated with Alpha Academy. Her work is deeply spiritual and yet fulsome and sensual, a tension produced by the many breaks in the line formats as she holds strictly to her discipline but bleeds meaning through erudite associations. It is a hard book to put down, and a satisfying one to read over and over. When she says

Island contours    in the
          blood –
where even the earth    moves

at the whim     of fault-lines
          (from “at the whim of fault-lines”)

she could be speaking autobiographically, or giving pointers to fellow Caribbean poets and colleagues as to how her poems were created. There are many references to religious matters and many sensual renditions of island memories, but never confusion between these aspects of her work, as shown below.

From “panel 2” in “measure of wings: a triptych”:

and commuters break    morning bread
             communing
on their urban    via dolorosa

From “mother-tongue/in parentheses iv”:

you speak in coral-white nights of floodlit
beach where stately palms in stark silhouette

raise chaliced leaves    keening to the wind
murmur your mother tongue    mourn your

loss    to the indigo dark    as silent deck chairs turn
their neatly-ordered rows    to the solitary swell

I feel that Soutar-Hynes would do well to amplify her sensual apprehension of her mother-island and show us writing that is not so committed to refractions of light and dark on the page. Her flow of thought and their rhythmic patterns would benefit from some lyricism of format to complement her verbal skill with descriptive island-scapes:

while seaweed
broods    beneath ragged-
textured seas    bleeding burnt sienna
(“mother-tongue/in parentheses i”)

She shows enormous promise to be lyrical should she choose to venture in that direction. But then I have not seen her first book of poems, published also by Seraphim and with the wonderful title the fires of naming which resonates with Michelle Cliff’s manifesto If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire. A little less obscurity and a little more of the kind of beauty we see demonstrated in such visual language in the “mother-tongue” poems would be a great benefit to this collection.

Souter-Hynes is represented in the anthology Calling Card: New Poetry from Caribbean/Canadian Women, edited by Pamela Mordecai. She is co-author of The Writer Within: Dialogue and Discovery, and her work has appeared in a variety of journals, in the chapbook anthology Six from the Sixth, and in Elements of English 12. She participated in a program at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1998, is a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and has just returned to Toronto from performing her poetry at the Miami convention of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS). She is a hard working intellectual poet with dual roots and a fine future before her.

Back to Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes Bio