“ Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a French composer and pianist known for his eccentricity and the unusual titles he gave his compositions. Carolyn Marie Souaid aptly evokes Satie in the title of her fourth collection, Satie’s Sad Piano. Right from the beginning of Satie’s Sad Piano, the language leaps off the page in exciting, vivacious rhythm and rhyme: “Poinsettias aghast. The children, too / in hats and scarves, skating / clear off the grind, pond crack, / their shrink-wrapped screams” You can hear the assonance in “aghast” and “hats;” then “pond cracked” and “shrink-wrapped” has a metrical parallelism that Souaid uses throughout, giving the collection a riff-like cadence. But more than pop for the ears, this collection of poems, told from several points of view, is a love story set against the backdrop of Trudeaumania. The poems also make use of Catholicism, Greek mythology and literature as points of reference bringing to mind Elizabeth Smart’s poetic novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. The lives of the character in Smart’s novel and Souaid’s character, Venus, parallel each other. Both fall for married men who are poets, both fall pregnant and both are martyrs to their passions and afraid of their lover’s wives: “What I mean to write, I won’t for fear: / ‘She’ in hot pursuit of our paper trail. / Darkness bleeding through the clouds. / Even here, in the filtered sunlight / beneath trees, / I speak only in whispers.” The poem, in the voice of Mont Royal, that captures Venus’s first meeting of her future love, parallels what is going on in the nation with Trudeau; in fact, the male character is a parallel character: “She first spied him at the epicentre, / the sun, in shambles, pivoting/ breathlessly around him / Genius? Philosopher? / Mountains, he’d said, gravitated to him / in dreams. Sermonizing, as always, / in puffed-up tongues. / Je ne reve pas en mots, je reve dans l’abstrait. / Which she interpreted of course, / misinterpreted, as strength.” There is a god-like quality to this masculine character with the sun “pivoting breathlessly around him.” We can see he is going to take over her world, as Trudeau takes hold of the passions of Canadians, and yet his strength is misinterpreted. There is a blur between the character of Trudeau and the male character so that Venus is falling not for a specific man, but the passions of the time and the exuberance of the nation. This is a complicated collection of poetry to summarize in a few words, which is one of its strengths. A reader who knows little of Canada’s history would still revel in the language, the long-limbed lines, the leaps, strong end-stops and the use of enjambment that creates double-meanings as in “reached deeper still / into the music / of her womb, vibrating / the darkest chords.” Though there is a smattering of cliches, some attempt to stretch beyond their all-too-familiar use, as does the language throughout this collection of multi-voiced poems.” —Yvonne Blomer, ARC Poetry Magazine