Description
Book SynopsisA strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey – through cities and their outskirts, to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into childhood, and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations.
Trade Review“You never know what unpredictable imaginative connections Maureen Hynes will make of earth’s challenges in Take the Compass, but you can be certain to leave her poems surprised by a deeper awareness and a clearer vision than you would ever have thought upon entering them. Other people have books on a bedside table; but Hynes has a “silver pillbox” full of ampersands. Her associations unfold in calibrated order, her seriousness tempered by whimsy.Yet the poems in Take the Compass, with their environmental and social concerns, are not surreal. They’re grounded in a sure maturity of voice that can twist and turn Hynes’s flexible lines into helixes of fresh understanding.” Molly Peacock
“In a world where ‘life’s a rough ascent, / an icy path, sometimes a precipice to hang from,’ the poems in Take the Compass point the reader to poignancy, compassion, and impish imagination. ‘Carry / curiosity and confusion in your hand,’ Maureen Hynes writes, and she does so bravely, in poems ranging from childhood to health and her bedside table. If ‘We have been too knotted / into death counts & pollen counts / & approval ratings’ then Hynes’s skilful poems are ‘silk or twine or rope for rescue or ascent.’” Kevin Irie
“Maureen Hynes welcomes us as an articulate and compassionate friend to a neighbourhood as expansive as human nature itself. Brightness emerges through bleakness: magnolia buds, lapis lazuli, the body a source of renewal, the firm, clear uplift of resistance. These poems are radiant.” Susan Gillis
