Book Review

Title: Open Slowly

Poems by Dayle Furlong

Publisher: Tightrope Books

Pages: 75

Released: June 14^th 2008

ISBN: 978-0978335137

Reviewed By: Isabel Lau (Vancouver Correspondent)

Looking for a satisfying coffee-shop-type of read? Pick up Dayle Furlong’s book of poetry called Open Slowly. Not a big poetry buff? Neither was I when I delved into her work but I guarantee her prose will be more delicious than that vanilla latte or slice of pumpkin cake. Furlong’s style is elegant when describing the urban casualties of love or the convoluted experience of growing up in a rural town, yet it is not overly precocious; one doesn’t have to try very hard to “get” her and it is this talent of making the personal so very universal in so very few words, that gives Furlong her unique flair.

One reads “Blue Lips” and is immediately transported into a cold winter in what could be Canada or the streets of New York. Furlong gracefully weaves severe topics like environmental damage and child abuse into her collection so that the reader is left staring quite heartbrokenly at the page. Reading the book aloud to a friend, I found my voice to falter when her beautifully broken excerpts of life became hard to bear; very few writers, even fewer poets, have been able to conjure such emotion in me. It is also perhaps Furlong’s experiences of living abroad in Central America and Asia that also add cultural authenticity, albeit from an observer’s perspective, to much of her writing.

Open Slowly is divided into three parts, “Impossible Permanence,” “Tonic and Brevity”, and “Litany of Desire”. They meld to provide a perfect snapshot of all things vulnerable to the often painful clamor of change as in “Experiments with the Living” and “This Relentless Pursuit”. However, beauty, hope, and sensuality is not forfeited. I am an in-the-closet romantic so “Wood and Nails” definitely had me at hello:

“…The work you do with your hands/ trace circles on my body/ chisel wood with tiny metal tools/ rub thin edges with your blackened thumbs/ brush my cheeks with the backside of your palm//

On your salary we’ll never have a large house/ you tell me you’ll build me one/ with your own hands and you/ squeeze my thighs and hover over me, an arched roof.”

Furlong’s capacity to draw desire with words will have any reader aching for more.