Late in his career, the English poet W. H. Auden distilled the whole business of poetry into three pungent lines: “A poet’s hope: to be, / like some valley cheese, / local, but prized elsewhere.” Think of Appenzeller, Raclette, or—given Auden’s farmhouse in Kirchstetten, Austria—Tyrolean Grey. Such names are known high and low, the flavours often imitated, but in each case, the real thing belongs to one place and one place only.
I say this with the utmost deference: Mary Dalton is a valley cheese. A consummate poet, she is eminently local, her terroir the idioms and folkways of Newfoundland. Although she has been recognized over the past thirty-five years, her bracing poetry is overdue for widespread acclaim. Inseparable from the easternmost province, it deserves to be read here, there, and everywhere.
