Read What The Critics Are Saying

< Passionate Intensity strikes a clear note with a bell's resonant overtones. A cosmos springs to life, with startling reverberation in our own ear. The murky depths of a life are clarified as readers are drawn through the artful process of poem-making. Taut pieces stretch between the oppositional structure of sprit and matter revealing the dimensions of possible human experience, where "Poetry is an imperative".

This book is translucent, as if written on water and still rippling, leaving so much space for reflection. How to write about spiritual practice? That's the dilemma. Linda Stitt has the knack of expressing difficult concepts in colloquial language. She eschews theory for practice. Concepts, Jungian or scientific, are rendered concrete; experience is realized in the poem. You can only assume that emotions have been lived into the poem and into the present moment. This isn't The Stitt Code, but nonetheless you could live your life and your poetics with this book as guide. Stitt embeds Buddhists terms nonchalantly throughout, as English expressions. Even the few technical words she does use are common coin: "karma", for example. Phrases from LAST WORD, the final poem in the book (see below), are words that can be read simply. the path, aspiration, realization, the vehicle, cessation, the final liberation... For a Buddhist, their meaning reverberates, though Stitt writes with a total lack of pretension or condescension. Such clarity is hard won. T.S. Eliot refers to "a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything."

In TAKE YOUR MEDICINE, Stitt writes: "Open wide/ and say awe." What counts is the moment of writing, Stitt's delight in the senses, the surrealistic and telling detail. "Talk to me in poetry./ It's all I understand." The poems are available on first reading, and they stay with you long afterwards. Wry, wise, wonky by turns, they turn on a phrase. You're sauntering along through the poem, enjoying the view, and it's a wide view, when suddenly,a sudden twist and you're laughing out loud. Stitt has the gift of endings. She had "considered calling this book Lacking All Conviction, but that seemed a little too presumptuous." Her title instead is taken from the next line of Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming": "while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." This phrase belies the body of the work in Passionate Intensity"but these times call for extremes"
The poems engage all of life's questions, a spectrum that age allows. Not solemn, but serious, even when most funny. It's a delightful surprise to read that the poet is now over seventy. The poems themselves are so agile they leap, rhyming, playing, dancing through all the aspects of human experience. The contents span the four cardinal points of the year, from fall equinox to summer solstice, a complete cycle. Stitt writes in a note at the end, "The exploration continues, even now that I have exceeded my shelf life and surpassed my best before date." Long may she continue, and long may the words flow.

This is a book I wish I'd written Without pretending to be wise, Stitt offers pointers, signs, even the occasional answer. The poems skip like pebbles, rippling over a clear, deep lake. A lake from which a lotus might emerge. The lotus on the back cover, for example, symbolic of Buddhism.

LAST WORD, P. 73

And if I never write again,
have I said all I had to say?
Have I repeated now, sufficient times
that love is the only road,
the only way?
Have I said,
again and again,
what I said at the start,
      that the only path
      is the path with heart?

That is what I found
at the beginning;
love is the foundation
and the underpinning.
Love is the aspiration
and the realization,
the vehicle
and destination,
the inspiration
and the ultimate cessation.

I've said it from the first,
I've said it all before.
I'll say it for the last time,
      just once more,
the only obligation,
the terminal summation,
the final liberation
is love.

<

Linda was well received in 2001
and again in 2003
when she went back to Thunder Bay for a series of readings and performances.
The reviews above and below are from
the

Another good mention in November 2003
from Toronto's "surface and symbol" newspaper.