Merrybegot by Mary Dalton

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Merrybegot
by Mary Dalton
The unabridged audio edition Performed by Anita Best with Patrick Boyle on trumpet and flugelhorn.
Born of a cultural tradition rooted in story and song, Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot celebrates the poetic cadence and phrasing of the Newfoundland vernacular through a series of short dramatic monologues. These poems reel like an outlandish jig or spark and smoke like dry boughs flung upon a campfire. They are impassioned, sullen, outspoken or conspiratorial; each voice arresting in its idiosyncratic delivery, each story an element in the creation of a vivid and distinctive portrait of a people and a culture.
Mary Dalton
Mary Dalton was born at Lake View in Conception Bay, Newfoundland. She is Professor of English in the Department of English Literature and Language at Memorial University in St. John’s, where she teaches various poetry courses. Her poems, reviews, essays and interviews have been published in journals and anthologies in Canada, Ireland and the United States, most recently in Open Field: Contemporary Canadian Poets, released by Persea Books of New York in April 2005. Mary is a former editor of Tickle Ace and of the interdisciplinary journal Newfoundland Studies.
Mary Dalton has published three volumes of poetry, The Time of Icicles (Breakwater, 1989 and 1991), Allowing the Light (Breakwater, 1993) and Merrybegot (Véhicule Press, Signal Editions, 2003), in addition to a chapbook of poems also entitled Merrybegot (Running the Goat Books and Broadsides, 2002). Another collection is forthcoming from Véhicule in the spring of 2006. She has won various awards for her poetry, among them the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Competition for Poetry in 1997 and again in 2002 and the inaugural TickleAce/Cabot Award for Poetry in 1998. Merrybegot was shortlisted for the 2004 all-genre Winterset Award, the 2004 Pat Lowther Memorial Poetry Award, and is the winner of the 2005 E.J. Pratt Poetry Award, the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry.
Selected Book Reviews:
These are fast poems. They slip by quickly, yet once gone, still hold hard to the ear and tongue. They’re a mix of curse and blessing, the poems feathered as clean as newborn swallows as they dip and weave in the winsome cadences and idioms of Newfoundland. They are like something overheard in the street or at a table in a bar just after it opens, short as a joke and deep as a charm. [These poems] lift us from the obviously crafted, intellectual poem to an art that echoes the best of William Butler Yeats’s late poems, where he gave up artifice for the simplicity of joy and beauty.
—Patrick Lane, The Globe and Mail
The best pure discovery [among the poets in the American anthology of contemporary Canadian poetry, Open Field]—the most original poet whom almost no U.S. readers will know—comes from perhaps the least urban locale: the place is Lake View, Newfoundland, the poet Mary Dalton, whose spiky, dialect-strewn verse animates passionate fishermen, overworked wives, nearly pre-industrial hardships, and striking figures of speech.
—Stephen Burt, The Yale Review
It is a language festival, a lark, a goof-off of words. It is the love of saying....Hear this poetry. Dalton has a marvellous ear for speech, and every poem claims a hold on the ear....If your contact with Newfoundland is mostly with starchy Rex Murphy, I’d recommend a copy of Merrybegot.
—Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire
Merrybegot yields a series of brilliant-cut verbal surfaces...[the] lines speak for themselves far better than they can be spoken for. The best I can do is indicate the poignant imagery, sharp wit and effective concision of Dalton’s words....Poem after delightful poems follows...Perhaps most importantly, one has the sense of coming into contact with a living language, its cultural history strongly present alongside its cultural immediacy....Dalton’s craftsmanship is impeccable.
—Asa Boxer, Books in Canada
Merrybegot's language is fresh, sharp, musical, and loaded with meaning. At times the poems create the slightly hair-raising effect that you get when language performs in new and slightly unusual ways. How is it that they manage to have both a curatorial and experimental feel? Ultimately these “small monologues” are true love poems to place. They will stand whatever time throws at them....
—Patrick Warner, The Fiddlehead
This tight sequence of terse dramatic monologues in Newfoundland dialect is a remarkable piece of poetic compression. Besides being meditations on the idioms of Mary Dalton’s home province, these minimalist poems manage, with a few brushstrokes, to paint a complex picture of an outport community, with all its heavy weather, tightly knit co-operation, vicious gossip, love , misery, lust and bigotry. This is poetry that, in its unsentimental fidelity to local linguistic and social details, fashions a world readily apprehended by any mainlander.
—Zachariah Wells, maisonneuve
Steering clear of sentimentality, [Dalton’s] love of place emerges not by way of romanticized exposition but through the crusty, irreverent monologues of the inhabitants themselves, their language distilled to its purest, most potent essence. [Merrybegot is] the lively offspring of oral language and western text, a hybrid of rhythms that refuses to stray “too far from music.”
—Carolyn Marie Souaid, The Montreal Gazette
...a real find...Dalton is sharp, insistent and dramatic.
—Thomas McCarthy, The Irish Times
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Audio Reviews:
From AudioFile magazine:
A marriage of words and music, this collection of poems by Newfoundland author Mary Dalton is performed by two artists, narrator Anita Best and horn player Patrick Boyle. The poems are a fresh experience, a tour of a country told in its language. The lines ring with description--of fish and berry pails; social commentary, jokes, and insults--which is highlighted and punctuated by music. Anita Best has a smooth, deep voice that creates the necessary immediacy for engaging the listener in experiencing each poem. Patrick Boyle is gifted in expressing ideas through trumpet and flugelhorn, sometimes tremulous, sometimes mocking.
R.F. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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