Tina Celona's darkly lucid, lightly comic poems are unusually explicit in their attentiveness to the primacy of poetry as a natural force, a force akin to that of the tides or their correlative lunar cycle. Describing in clear, unabstracted terms such elements of the quotidian as war, freedom, dream, "Satisfaction," and imagination, Celona invokes poems and their poet with the same degree of focused intensity as she does more obvious, more conventionally useful objects such as Singer sewing machines, shrimp, straw, driveways, corpses. The result is not so much an elevation as a leveling, a tableau of meaning in which the poet and her poems achieve a plastic, spatial, significant reality on the luxuriously detailed plateau of the natural world: "The cliffs of the / seabed the / Poem twisting like a / Tornado over the / Plains of the interior / Decoration".
Winner of the 2002 Alberta Prize
