Guernica Editions

The poems in Sonia Di Placido's Exaltation in Cadmium Red lay authoritative and stylish claim to an older, deeper, more poetically acute and powerful song than is often heard in Canadian poetry. They evoke ancient passion - passion in all its senses of fullness of erotic feeling, suffering, and spirituality; they seem drawn molten out of the fires of experience and out of the poet's vulnerable, desirous, fierce core at "absolute stations of [her] dance with words." At their most sensitively pitched and concentrated, these utterances pour themselves into phrasings of such inordinate evocativeness and beauty that they set forth imaginative apprehensions of a divine erotic reality. They're "dipped in sweat,/ adjacent to permission/ and holy blood." They move through "lush networks of/ fortune"; they "waltz/ in vineyards,/ drunk on audacity." They enact an exultant roving fire and burning - yet they live within "the bounds of ... aperture or design." This is the secret of the poet of Exaltation in Cadmium Red; out of her "fierce respect for mystery" she creates intense poetic forms that are "subtle, sacred, and sleek" and that succeed in "releasing ... awe."

Sonia Di Placido's poems are eloquent and intelligent, free, dark and painfully beautiful. They are solitary planets of energy in their unique trajectory searching for and growing towards other powerful forces.