Short Reviews of Splendid in its Silence
This is a work of profound and generous intimacy. Each poem is a brief intrigue into the dark beauty that can be found in the quotidian and in the quiet spaces that fold us into filial contemplation. What is a daughter, a shiver, a crème blanket, a city street, or an iridescent wing? Neale so deftly implores us to feel the radiant longing enclosed within the fleeting silence of these cinematic songs.
Liz Howard, 2016 winner of the Griffin Prize
for Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent
“The world of Jude Neale’s poems is a place of luminous moments where a careful intelligence is surprised by emotional depths.”
Jack Hodgins, author of Spit Delaney’s Island,
The Invention of the World, The Master of Happy Endings
Jude Neale possesses an arresting voice that gives the ache and awe of our ordinary lives an incantatory eloquence.
Betsy Warland, Oscar of Between — A Memoir of Identity and Ideas
This is an elegant and heartfelt elegy with resonant recollections and touching details, very human, very ordinary, but of that small order of the magically ordinary – like the berries in the poem that once picked and basketed can be relished over and over with the wild bitter sweet mix of sadness and joy. The poem also mulls the rural and urban into a very special liquidity, the City of Vancouver and the countryside with the fluidity of the river that runs through both and which becomes the sound of Mary Greener Thompson, to whose memory the poem is dedicated. It is very easy to hear and listen to the voice of this poet.
‘Wild Berry’ by Jude Neale, reviewed by former
poet laureate, George McWhirter