Slender Certainties, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes’ fifth book of poetry, continues her poetic quest to make sense of the world and her place in it. In this deeply private, yet revealing collection, the page is a radical space where poems are freed to touch, to grieve, to desire, and to wonder. Returning to themes of love, loss and life’s dilemmas that fuelled her earlier work, she expands their scope, drawing inspiration from science, concepts of time, and the inescapable truth of her own mortality.
This book is a co-publication with Aeolus House.
Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes is a Jamaican-Canadian, poet/educator and former nun. A Fellow at Scotland’s Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Fall, 2009, her literary publications include the collections: Dark Water Songs (2013); Travelling Light (2006), long-listed for the 2007 ReLit Poetry Award; and The Fires of Naming (2001). Published in Canada, the UK and The Netherlands, her work includes poetry and essays in journals and anthologies and chapters in edited books. She lives in Toronto.
Praise for the author’s previous books:
“In Travelling Light, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes … produces for the reader, from line to line to line that satisfying pleasure of mutable, unexpected recognitions … these poems risk a “sloping boundary” of meanings, and play them out to fullest potential.”
- Maxiane Berger, author of Winnows
“Any Waking Morning is a luminous collection of poems, combining delight in the senses, intellect, emotion and spirit. … I love the musical flow of her lines, the internal rhymes, the visual shape of the poems on the page. She is a care-ful poet, naming and articulating with care and caring about her subjects and her language”
- Ellen S. Jaffe, author of Skinny-Dipping with the Muse
“Mornings, for Soutar-Hynes, are waking to a sensual surround, to thought and writing. Her poems convey a painterly gaze, alert to subtlety of colour, tone; their sculptural presentation on the page gives visual pause, pace, emphasis … This is wonderful writing.”
- Cornelia Hoogland, author of Trailer Park Elegy
