Pattern of Genes
Pattern of Genes examines a life well lived, full of humour and character, but filled also with inescapable losses. These are intensely intimate poems that take us from the poet’s childhood in Winnipeg in the Second World War through her experiences as a Wren in the Royal Canadian Navy and as a traveller. There is a spirit of adventure and romance in her work, a vivid sense of time and place, but there is also a pervading elegiac tone as she copes with bereavement and loneliness.
Reviews
The virtue and reward of the poems is not in the innovative use of form or novel content, but in the dexterous imagistic strokes, the economy of means. Van Stelten knows how to turn a line and how to use the sonic glue of assonance, alliteration, sibilance, slant and full rhyme … to rein in the syllables or loosen the lope of phrase and image as they uncoil down her page. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Van Stelten’s verse is both visually driven, concentrating on the observable, and possessed of a solid aural foundation… The better poems in this collection combine these two virtues to paint exquisite miniatures. ~Alexander Rettie, Alberta Views
Stalwart soul with a twist of romance, Rosalee van Stelten weaves spells with her words. Each poem in Pattern of Genes offers a mirror for emotional reflection and invites contact with the poet as well as with one’s self. Whether she is writing about family, places she has lived and visited, or wrenching personal loss, the poet’s direct language and imagery reach deep. Her humor and wisdom salve tears that the poems invite. ~Nina Krebs, author of Edgewalkers and Changing Woman Changing Work
Samples
Tourist’s Lament
where are the cowboys they promised me strolling the streets of Calgary booted and spurred? where are the horses forsaking trails to terrorize banks and shopping malls leaving deposits no returns? no rogues from the range in vest and chaps just retired oilmen in baseball caps is all I see rhinestone wranglers in designer jeans johnny-come-latelies and might-have-beens desk jockies whose muscles have gone to waist youths and maidens no longer chaste where are the heroes of flint and steel? not at the stockyards making a deal this frustrating quest has left me short-changed in fact, truth to tell I feel quite de-ranged.
In Mona’s Arms
come to your big fat Auntie Mona she would say headlong we rushed into her arms felt laughter rise from belly to bosom while she squeezed all but our last breath in fierce hug of love my mother wrote a romance about this elder sister A beauty much sought after by the opposite sex hid the pages beneath the parlour rug where their discovery triggered loud guffaws for Mona was plain her beauty cupped in a heart fired by love long afterward when cancer had shaved her to a skeletal corpse cousin clung to cousin marvelled that each felt so loved as if she alone had been held in Mona's arms
