“Mine is a Newfoundland-centred universe.”
   Mary Dalton

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.

Dalton’s new book, Interrobang, is named for an awkward bit of punctuation that combines a question mark and an exclamation point. Betwixt and between, fundamentally ironic, it’s the typographical equivalent of WTF; in one poem, Dalton dubs it the “prince of ambivalence.” Chess experts and finicky readers use exclamation points to record smart moves and bons mots, while question marks flag dubious tactics and sloppy phrasings. But the interrobang muddles neat distinctions, fusing doubt and certainty, success and error. The title tells us that Dalton’s poems ask questions and make statements all at once—as good poems, like riddles, tend to do. Sixty years ago, the critic Northrop Frye proposed that “Where is here?” was the “riddle” at the heart of a “Canadian sensibility.” Dalton loves riddles, but her poems are sure of at least one thing: here is an island in the North Atlantic.

In Interrobang, Dalton is drawn to the evocative objects and heirlooms of that island: the shop bell that “announces an entry,” the money box that keeps “news of unpaid bills, unkept / promises to itself,” a blue bottle of “Gerald S. Doyle’s Newfoundland Cod Liver Oil” with its “stinking / gut-churning goodness.” Or, if not objects, specimens: “Tansy,” “Stinging Nettle,” “Dog Rose,” “Joe Pye Weed.” She alludes to the plants’ medicinal properties, largely forgotten now, as carefully as she documents the names of Holyrood clubs: “The Butterpot Tavern, Mother Hickey’s, Mary Anne LaCour’s, Davises’, Fureys’, Crawleys’.” Here, poet and community historian are virtually the same. But Dalton is no singer of shanties. Rather, she is an observant, almost anthropological poet whose scrupulous attention to her home place resists the flattening of language and culture. Her poetry captures what she calls “the tang and texture” of local speech.

If this sounds a touch quaint, rest assured that Dalton’s poems are rarely sentimental. They have few epiphanies and no grand pronouncements. Her poetry is cool, reserved, and seldom, despite its subject, folksy. A line from Interrobang could be a motto for Dalton’s eventual Collected Poems: “nostalgia be damned.”
    -PROFILE: Forget Polite Verse—This Poet Wants You to Feel the Salt and Soil of Newfoundland: Mary Dalton’s fight to preserve her community’s speech (Nicholas Bradley, Nov. 7, 2024, The Walrus)

The Jillicker

He was the best jillicker in the harbour--
In the long run, they said, he'll make his mark--
An arm like that on him, and a brain to match--
Now he's just another drunken uncle--
You can set your clock by him in all weathers,
Sashaying down over the Big Meadow,
Thumbs in his belt-loops, cock of the walk,
Set to trade cuffers, for a few smokes and a beer.

jillick v
jillick v EDD jellick Do; cp EDD jelt 1. To throw a (flat) stone across the surface of a body of water, using an underhand motion; SKIM. Dictionary of Newfoundland English

cuffer n cuffer n also cuff EDD cuff v 4 (2): cuffer 'a tale, a yarn' (Austr); 6 sb 'a lie'; O Sup2 ~ sb2 (1887).
    Dictionary of Newfounldland English