Sharon’s Bio:
Sharon McCartney is the author of the highly praised collection Under the Abdominal Wall, which was selected for the BC 2000 Book Awards Program. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a law degree from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Her poems have been published in journals such as Queen’s Quarterly, Grain, Event, Prism International and The Malahat Review. A former resident of Victoria, she taught legal research and was the coordinator of the Arts and Writing Co-op at the University of Victoria. McCartney is a volunteer member of the editorial staff of The Fiddlehead in Fredericton.
Goose Lane’s note on For and Against:
Sharon McCartney’s visceral exploration of relationships — how they begin and end, the tenuous threads that hold people together, and the events that can tear them apart is unstintingly, eyes-wide-open aware. Beginnings, endings, transitions — none elude the sometimes sardonic but always sensitive, sinuous, and frank language of McCartney’s finely wrought poems. Shedding wilful blindness in favour of life-affirming humour, McCartney pushes language from absolute rawness to moments of intimate retrospection, revealing a delicate tension between anger and calm, past and present, denial and acceptance.
George Elliot Clarke on For and Against: “You don’t read these poems, you feel them: Hammer in the head, shod foot on the throat, stiletto in the heart. It’s those combos of wild, piercing insights (or unusual but poignant images).”
Sample Poem from For and Against
“Through”
Remember the night I completely lost it?
Pouring shots in the kitchen. To irony!
Then dancing into bookshelves. Wasn’t
it obvious I was desperate? Unhappiness
a conflagration I was attempting to douse
with thimblefuls of alcohol. Nothing gets
easier. Nothing. Winter-stunned denizens
of this hateful municipality, boot-tongues
flapping, wandering the Superstore aisles
brokenly, mouths open. No, dear 84-year-old
Margaret greeting me at the pool, no, it isn’t
a fresh, crisp day. It’s a truly fucked-up day,
my marriage moribund, thoughts a mutinous
rabble. Your small town pride, morality,
just more ways to get suckered, hoodwinked,
hand over your taxes. Peace, charity, warmth
like the dog’s favourite ball lost under snow
until April, or the cold lump of flesh incised,
the wound cauterized with the iron of desire,
blind passion — when he wants to slap me,
but gently, I let him. My life like a party
I’m dying to leave — the wrong people came.
Related posts:
Twitter
I have a handwritten notebook of poems that make me breathe deeply and shed some tears. Every once in a while I make a new entry. “Through” will be one of them. Thank you Goose Lane and Salty Ink for bringing writers like Sharon McCartney into my personal existence.
I’m a fan of raw, honest, accessible poetry like this myself. No need wrapping up sentiment in a pretty package of words: I like things captured, not adorned. I liek poetry articulated skillfully and shot from book to reader like an arrow!