A Short Poetry Book Review By Diane Girard: Stars In the Junkyard by Sharon Berg: “The poems in Stars in the Junkyard have depth, intensity glimpses of brightness that encourage rereading”

Stars in the Junkyard

Sharon Berg

cyberwit.net    ©2020

124 pages Paperback $16.00

Stars in the Junkyard is a collection of poems by Canadian writer, Sharon Berg.  Her work digs into the kinds of loss, abuse, and betrayal that she, like many other women has suffered and yet, there is hope and sometimes an unexpected tenderness. Her poems are intensely personal, but there is a universality to them. They are layered, intricate, intimate and non-pretentious. Much of what she writes is about how families interact. This short poem speaks to her desire to be heard.

Difficult

I am difficult.

You are right in that, brother.

I am as difficult to love as you are to love

with your shifting moods

and world-blaming pains.

I am the family truth-teller no matter your idea of private.

That makes me painful for anyone in my family

or closely associated

To love.

Listen, I do not write

to deliver beatifications

for the sake of family or lovers.

I do not write to assuage

your conscience or mine

by blaming others.

I write to understand

truth in the development

 of human relations.

I speak to my own

Experience.

Allow me my voice.

© Sharon Berg 2020

In some of her work, Berg delves into her family history and skewers it with needle-like precision. This quote is from Coming of Age, “Inch by inch, I banish hairy shadows,/ every closet revealing family bones./ One shadow builds on another, the face/ over breakfast the same, yet unlike/ the nightmare skeleton that wore his desires. The roles in our home reversed, child/ giving the parent comfort.”

In other poems an homage to lovemaking is found as in these lines from Spellbound: “the heart whispers lyrical/ ventricles pounding/ flesh surrounding / a dangerous phrasing/ that admits us vulnerable/ the mind leaping/ in acrobatic musing/ I rise as blue dawn/ cracks the black opaline/ sky still swinging/ on the pendulum/ of our passions”.

Her long poem Anthems for the Homeland, is a response to the Oka crisis (also called the Kanesatake Resistance) that took place in Quebec in 1990 when the Mohawk protested because the bones of their ancestors were threatened by the expansion of a golf course into their ancestral lands.

The poems in Stars in the Junkyard have depth, intensity glimpses of brightness that encourage rereading. Many of them have been published in periodicals in Canada, the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, India and Australia. 

Sharon Berg is a poet, a fiction author, and a historian of First Nations education in Canada. She lives in Charlottetown,  Newfoundland and Labrador where she operates Oceanview Writers Retreat.

Diane Girard © 2022