Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Bonny Cassidy, Giramondo Publishing, $24.00.
This collection of poems has a guise that’s akin to being a family portrait, bearing a resemblance to one another in foxed, dormant ways.
A chatelaine is the mistress of a castle or ancestral household, but there’s more to its mean in this collection. In the elegant, but unruly house ‘mysterious transformations occur, dreams and hallucinations project strange apparitions and landscapes, words twist and turn, references to tradition go hand in hand with sci-fi special effects and cinematic staging’.
The place reverberates with allegations and reservations that are disparaging.
The happenings are unsettling, but the poems ask obvious questions. Who lives here, who does this place belong to, who will inherit it and who comes as a visitor?
