Zonailo, Carolyn 1947–

views updated

Zonailo, Carolyn 1947–

(Carolyn Joyce)

PERSONAL:

Born January 21, 1947, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; daughter of Matt and Anne Zonailo; married Stephen Morrissey (a poet), April 10, 1995; children: Alexander, Cassidy. Ethnicity: "Russian/Scots." Education: Attended University of Rochester; University of British Columbia, B.A., 1971; Simon Fraser University, M.A., 1980. Hobbies and other interests: Jungian and archetypal psychology.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Montreal, Quebec, Canada. E-mail—cz@carolynzonailo.com.

CAREER:

Poet, writer, editor, lecturer, and creative writing teacher. Also worked as a publisher of a small literary press. Consulting astrologer and lecturer on topics of astrology and mythology, under name Carolyn Joyce.

MEMBER:

League of Canadian Poets (British Columbia representative, 1985-87; national executive 1988-90; Quebec representative, 1997-98), Federation of British Columbia Writers (founding executive, 1982-85), Writers' Union of Canada (national council, Quebec representative, 1996-97).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Press Porcépic Poetry Annual award; British Columbia Federation Centennial award, 1986.

WRITINGS:

Inside Passage, Caitlin Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1977.

Auto-da-fe, blewointmentpress (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1977.

Zone 5, blewointmentpress (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1978.

Split Rock, Caitlin Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1979.

The Wide Arable Land (poetry), Caitlin Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1980.

A Portrait of Paradise, blewointmentpress (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1983.

Compendium, Heron Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1985.

Zen Forest (poetry), Caitlin Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1987.

The Taste of Giving: Poems New and Selected, Caitlin Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1990.

Letters of the Alphabet, Greensleeve Editions (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), 1992.

Nature's Grace (poetry), Empyreal Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1993.

Memory House (poetry), Empyreal Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1995.

Twin Souls, Poem Factory (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1996.

Wading the Trout River (poetry), Empyreal Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1997.

Winter, Morgaine House (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1998.

The Goddess in the Garden, Ekstasis Editions (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2002.

The Holy Hours, Morgaine House (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2004.

Seed-Time: A Sonnet Sequence, Coracle Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2005.

The Moon with Mars in Her Arms, Ekstasis Editions (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2006.

Writings included in anthologies, including Reinventing Memory, 2000; The Dominion of Love, 2000; Eternal Conversations: Remembering Louis Dudek, 2003; Re:Generations; Canadian Women Poets in Conversation, 2005; and Arms like Ladders: The Eloquent She; Poems from the Feminist Caucus, 2007. Contributor to periodicals, including Antigonish Review, Calyx, Canadian Literature, Canadian Forum, Event, (Ex)Cite, Fiddlehead Review, Fireweed, Matrix, and Writing.

Zonailo's papers are house in the contemporary literature collection at the library of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

ADAPTATIONS:

The poem "Journey to Sibyl" was scored, performed, and recorded by Al Neil, 1981; poems from The Taste of Giving: Poems New and Selected, were scored and recorded by Kevin Godsoe, 1991. Additional poems have been set to music and performed by Mark Armanini, and were recorded on a compact disc by Kate Hammett-Vaughn in 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Carolyn Zonailo is a Canadian writer and editor whose growth as a poet has been charted by reviewers since the late 1970s. Her lyric poems were noted for their feminist and mythic themes in the early part of her career, when she was earning a reputation in her native province of British Columbia. She received increasingly enthusiastic reviews as her poetry became focused on details of landscape and daily living, using them to create references and metaphors linked to larger concepts. In a quotation from the Canadian Book Review Annual, Zonailo described herself as using her own experiences and memories to "shed light on our collective human experience."

One of Zonailo's early collections is The Wide Arable Land, which Quill and Quire reviewer Rosemary Aubert described as having a "pre-Raphaelite visual opulence" and remarkably "effective" botanical images. Aubert gave special attention to the opening poem about Eve tending the garden of Eden as she would a backyard plot. In a Books in Canada review, Stephen Scobie called the collection "an uneven book" that nonetheless includes "poems of great lyric beauty and subtlety." Deeming "The Red Camillias" to be "over-extended whimsy," he preferred the mythic symbolism of "Journey to the Sybil."

Ten years later, the volume Zen Forest prompted Canadian Literature reviewer Marya Fiamengo to call Zonailo "a poet of some achievement," adding, "Her work is distinguished by a diligent commitment to imaginative growth." As part of this larger consideration of Zonailo's body of work, Fiamengo named "Journey to the Sybil" as an important precursor to Zen Forest because of its "sustained exploration of interior space." She described the new collection as taking on the more challenging task of documenting and ascribing meaning to a particular landscape or place, and doing so in order to "create a metaphor of the enduring and permanent which lies beyond the palpably physical." Fiamengo singled out "Third Beach" and "Spanish Banks" as poems almost reaching this goal. "I suspect the minimalist style the poet adopts in these poems does her sensibility a disservice," suggested the critic, who listed the poems "The Geese," "Meditation for My Stepson," "Woman Walking Dog," and "Cyclist in Spring Rain" as among the collection's best.

The Taste of Giving: Poems New and Selected offers readers a sampling of poems Zonailo completed over the course of fifteen years. According to Ronald B. Hatch in the University of Toronto Quarterly, the volume shows ways in which the poet had overcome problems found in her earlier work: "Zonailo's poetry has been flawed by a flatness of personal description, but the new poems give voice to a quiet lyricism that proves appealing." He found evidence that the source of this new beauty was the poet's "acceptance of a bounded life."

The books Nature's Grace, Memory House, and Wading the Trout River make up Zonailo's "East Coast Trilogy," work that corresponds with her moving from British Columbia to Montreal, Quebec. A review of Memory House by Elizabeth St. Jacques in the Canadian Book Review Annual described the section titled "In the House of God" as recounting the poet's experiences in various roles, including the most difficult moments in life as well as the most comforting and beautiful times. Poems in the grouping "In the House of Childhood Dreams" were noted for containing both charming, happy memories and an acknowledgment of personal flaws. St. Jacques praised the collection, saying, "Zonailo's poems ring like mellow bells—clean, vivid, vibrant, brilliant."

The last book of the trilogy and Zonailo's eighth full-length collection of poetry, Wading the Trout River, is comprised of four sections: "Geographies of the Heart," "The Male Nudes," "Twin Souls," and "Letters of the Alphabet." As is reflected in these subtitles, the collection's dominant themes are love and gender roles. In the Canadian Book Review Annual, Don Precosky called it "a mature and intelligent" collection that is not "narrowly personal." He named religion, pop psychology, and the seemingly mundane as being within the collection's field of reference. In a Canadian Literature review, Susan Drodge characterized the poet as being "direct in her diction and compassionate in their characterizations." In contrast to Precosky, the critic regretted that Zonailo's "intimate addresses to a specific romantic partner" limit the reader's understanding of the poems, but concluded that this device is also important to the writer's "ultimate success in eliciting a voyeuristic impulse to synthesize self and other."

Zonailo told CA "As a poet, I am interested in how and where the physical and spiritual meet. I see the visionary not as opposite the everyday, but rather as both levels of experience being present at the same time and place—if we are receptive to more than just the linear or literal. It is in this combination of the day-to-day, along with the quest for universal perspective, where my poetry resides. I am alive in the physical world, so that is where my poetry begins, grounded in personal experience, landscape, the mundane, and human nature. This intersection of the physical and metaphysical, the daily and the mythic, could be called a poetry situated at the threshold, where one's feet are firmly in the here and how, yet one's psyche, imagination, and dreaming self are searching for greater meaning. This is a perception that includes metaphor, image, and the collective as part of what can be experienced.

"I also want the language of my poetry to remain direct, accessible, and open to the reader. I write so that the reader can understand my poetry and identify with the common life situations in my poems. This does not mean I only write about simple subjects; rather that I try to make complexity as clear, as visual, and as comprehensible as possible. I write to reach out and speak to others. The poem needs to have texture. By that I mean a cadence, rhythm, or elegance of language, but not in a formalist sense, but rather in the search for the exact phrasing, the natural rhythmic pattern. I also expect poetry to have an emotional content and a visual quality.

"Some poems seem to need little rewriting; others can take up to a hundred drafts. Each poem I have written is unique, original, and the writing process is never quite the same. There are poems that I carry in my mind for a long time before I actually write the poem down on paper. The poem shapes itself slowly, and I keep it in my head, thinking and hearing the poem long before I commit it to the page. How do I know when a poem is finished? When the poem stops nagging me, when it leaves me alone, then I feel that I have completed the task of creating that particular piece.

"I began writing in student magazine when I was in high school and have continued to write throughout my life. At every age I have incorporated into my writing an appreciation of nature and landscape, a fascination with eros, and a reverence for the courage individuals display in the face of whatever life experiences come along. There are other themes in my writing that have remained constant, such as writing about the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary, how we cope with mortality, and the gender balance between men and women. I see each individual as unique, and yet I am reminded that we are all globally connected.

"My love of poetry and literature began early, when my mother read me bedtime stories; then, at age eleven I was given my first diary. I began my study of mythology while in high school. I studied classical Greek literature, philosophy, and comparative religions in university. Another definite influence on my writing is my passion for visual art: namely, painting and sculpture. My heritage as a doukhobor (spirit wrestler) brings another quality to my writing, since the doukhobors are pacifists who were persecuted in Russia and relocated to Canada under the sponsorship of the writer Leo Tolstoy. My poetry also contains a political basis, influenced by my ancestry and my feminist perceptions. I often speak out against violence, oppression, and gender discrimination.

"My personal journey through life has also been an adventure in composing the poem or the piece of writing as it reveals itself to me. I feel that I am at the service of the poem, not the other way around. I call this writing visionary poetry, one in which the personal and the universal intersect. I am receptive to the poem, but I also work diligently at the craft of writing. When meaning, content, craft, and that special spark of creativity from the collective come together in a seamless flow—there is the poem!

"As I have continued to write and publisher, while at the same time growing older, I think I have learned my craft and acquired a wisdom that only seems to come with age. I feel I always had my own poetic voice and subject matter, but when I was young I worked hard to create the form and language to contain my poetic vision. Now I have earned the confidence to trust my poet's craft. I can rely on it to carry what I need to say. That doesn't mean that the struggle to write comes any easier! But the more one writes, the more one learns, both about the craft of writing and about what there is to know about life.

"My primary motivation for writing is to try and make sense of what it means to be alive, to be human. In the act of creation we can explore and discover insights that would not otherwise be readily accessible."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Books in Canada, November, 1979, Albert Moritz, review of Split Rock and Zone 5, p. 29; April, 1982, Stephen Scobie, "Notes from the Underground," pp. 25-26.

Canadian Book Review Annual, 1995, Elizabeth St. Jacques, review of Memory House, p. 235; 1998, Don Precosky, review of Wading the Trout River, p. 3219.

Canadian Literature, spring-summer, 1990, Marya Fiamengo, review of Zen Forest, pp. 351-353; summer, 2000, Susan Drodge, review of Wading the Trout River, p. 122.

Quill and Quire, April, 1982, Rosemary Aubert, "New Stars in the Galaxy of Canadian Poetry," p. 30.

University of Toronto Quarterly, fall, 1991, Ronald B. Hatch, review of The Taste of Giving: New and Selected Poems, pp. 64-65.