Cathedral/Grove
“A stunning and expansive poetry collection that demands the reader reconstruct a world under constant transformation.”
—Tiffany Morris, L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia and Elgin Award-winning poet, in Room magazine
Cathedral/Grove, Susan Glickman’s brilliant new collection, comes to terms with the question of legacy—what we leave behind as a species, as citizens, and as parents. Marked by the lucidity and precision she has been celebrated for, the poems encompass the monuments of Western civilization, a climate in decline, and the pandemic. The title is inspired by the fire that ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019, destroying the wooden roof-frame known as La Forêt; it also alludes to “Cathedral Grove,” otherwise known as MacMillan Provincial Park, one of the last old growth stands on Vancouver Island. In poems of praise and lament for our fractured world—“Everything is becoming more itself / or something else,” she writes—Glickman has tapped into a magnificent vein of lyric richness.
From the reviews
Tiffany Morris, in Room Magazine:
“In her newest poetry collection, Susan Glickman provides the reader with a reconstructed world—that is, Cathedral/Grove is a collection full of complex images and themes that contrast and build upon each other. In the poem ‘Maple,’ Glickman considers the titular tree, and ends with a metatextual rumination, stating that ‘Like it or not, / everything is a metaphor for everything else: / fish, virus, star, landmine, tree.’ The metaphors in this collection tend to work on these threads of connection: the built and the natural images come into contrast with the human, providing a lush and detailed backdrop for human and non-human experience… Cathedral/Grove seamlessly ponders and elevates the ordinary, using it as an axis through which the transcendent may be considered. These images and themes cohere together into a stunning and expansive poetry collection that demands the reader reconstruct a world under constant transformation.”
The indefatigable poet and musician Catherine Owen on her blog, Marrow:
“I remember when I was plundering the poetry section of the Burnaby Public Library as a teenager and I came across Susan Glickman’s Henry Moore’s Sheep. I was instantly compelled by her work, and am now happy, so many years later, to be writing a review of her 8th collection of poems, Cathedral/Grove… Glickman’s sonorous, intimate voice is instantly present, generously offering us glimpses of her life … Cathedral/Grove is eminently readable … rarely falling into a dull moment, and underscoring the truth that ‘when prayer fails,/art will serve.’”
In The Seaboard Review by Michael Greenstein, retired professor of Canadian literature and author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature:
“A cat perches on a bare branch, arched as if to pounce – a menacing image on the cover of Susan Glickman’s latest collection of poetry, Cathedral/Grove. Against a black background the cat appears almost white and moonlit, while the bare branches contour the feral creature. Its feline limbs grasp parallel branches, while its trunk rests as if it were a nurse log. Cathedral derives from seat, and the cat sits; grove derives from branch in this interconnected realm of flora and fauna. ‘Cathedral/Grove’ relates to Notre Dame in Paris and to MacMillan Provincial Park on Vancouver Island, as Glickman’s poems span geography and history.
The epigraph to this book, from Izumi Shikibu’s The Ink Dark Moon, echoes the cover’s moonlit sonatina: ‘the moonlight also leaks / between the roof planks / of this ruined house.’ Amidst planetary ruins, and between the sublime and picturesque, Glickman’s words restore domestic and natural order, for her baby grand piano lurks in the background sounds and is itself a miniature cathedral/grove responding to Bach and ‘tuned to the same vibration / like instruments to concert A.’”
Steven Beattie on his wonderful blog, That Shakesperian Rag:
“The notion that poetry must be an abstruse or obscure mode of communication in order to be effective is one of the things that keeps general readers alienated from the form; at its purest, as former Toronto poet laureate A.F. Moritz has pointed out, poetry is the most direct and unadorned way of saying what the writer wants to say.
Which certainly does not mean that poetry – even the most straightforward and transparent poetry – is incapable of addressing big subjects or themes, even when focusing on apparently quotidian moments. In Cathedral/Grove, Susan Glickman devotes a series of prose poems to everyday fruits and vegetables and to unremarkable tools – knives, secateurs, clamps – from around the house … Glickman’s prose poems, cast as first-person narratives told from the perspectives of the various artifacts she takes up, open outward into meditations about utility and the things we humans often take for granted…
Glickman’s light touch allows profound metaphysical questions to flourish absent dense philosophical language or inscrutable academic jargon. It’s a democratic approach that is, above all, welcoming to a broad range of readers.”
Poet Al Rempel in The British Columbia Review:
“Susan Glickman’s latest book of poetry, Cathedral/Grove, is forested with a wide variety of poems, or rather, communities of poems, both in style and subject matter. Pockets of prose-poems shoulder up near sunny slopes of free verse; poems that find their roots in daily life–deadheading flowers or walking the dog–stand tall next to poems of troubled histories: the pogroms in Russia or the conflagration of the Notre-Dame de Paris (the latter is described in the poem that forms the centrepiece of the book and shares its title).
Throughout the volume, Glickman (What We Carry) returns to the forest, from noting the ‘shadow’ a tree casts after a snowfall—’as though it were a memory of that tree’s / full-foliaged summer shadow, / the trees themselves stretching generous branches / to the sky, the snow caught up there, / unfallen’—to a startling image in a poem that explores the legend and forest of Robin Hood, where the deer move in ‘the greenwood, their antlers / another kind of forest, moving.’
As with any journey into the forest, we are confronted with both the familiar and surprises. ‘I’ve never noticed that before!’ is something we can find ourselves saying no matter how many times we’ve entered the same woods.”
Tireless writer and critic Mark Abley, playful as ever, on Facebook:
“Chateau Glickman: A poetry rooted in its Toronto terroir, with a well-structured base and an occasionally Romanesque finish, arboreal on the palate while showing exuberant hints of blackberry and vanilla.”
Alexa, on Goodreads:
“Cathedral/Grove makes me excited to age!
I want to live more life so I can observe so keenly as Glickman does. Her weaving together themes of life and loss, the natural and innate as well as contemplations of the function of the divine are crisp, aching and beautiful.”
Poet Gordon Phinn at WordCityLit:
Her new book Cathedral/Grove continues to build admiration for her expression. In any of its five sections I was drawn in a steady steam of ideas and images. Stimulated by some and soothed by others. Insightful and yet graceful. Heartfelt when called for, harsh when required. A poet of many modes and voices, she moves the reader through the roll call of life: walking the dog, travelling to funerals, re-examining the rickety remnants of history, the cultural heritage that chains us until we demand release.
