NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

In HOME FROM WORK, one of the finest poems in Susan Millar Dumars' collection of poetry, EVERYONE LOVES ME, she writes in an almost notebook style;

	The red rug floats like a postcard
	on the cold lake of linoleum.
	Mocking beard of dust
	on the typewriter cover

In this book, the poet is a conversationalist who can talk about Denice in the deli, a dead daughter, the remembrance of being a child, waiting for a train — that is to say, she's a raconteur whose subject matter is the world around her. At the same time, her poems are contoured by a highly sensitive degree of selectivity. In short, EVERYONE LOVES ME gives an exemplary impression of being the work of a craftsperson-conversationalist who never fails to discriminate between the good and bad in people.

Carefully selected for their impact and understatement, brilliant in their accomplishment, the majority of the twenty-four poems in the collection are open, many-sided events. Yet Millar Dumars' voice moves at its own pace, building effects in a subdued and vernacular tone.

A persistent signature of Millar Dumars' work is her willingness to engage with philosophical ideas. A discursive, intelligent, deeply emotional poem as, say, OPEN PALMS, with its remembered conversation, its emptiness of language and vacuous simplicity is a classic poem in which the poet balances the groundedness and the ungroundedness of the speaker in the form of a philosophically self-aware song.

		I dream he is murdered.
	The yard scattered
	with the boot prints of soldiers,
	deep and sharp.
	In the tall grass I find the head
	of our German Shepherd, still
	faithfully watching.

	Many people at Number Five
	will say there's too many
	at Number Five —
	cardiganned aunties in cruel beehives
	will say there's no room
	in Number Five.

	She drags her words up
	from a hot wound in her belly.

	Acid eats through
	the protective layers
	and creates gaping
			sucking
				burning.

Millar Dumars achieves a similar effect by a very different means in a poem like RAIN AGAIN. Here two lovers are pictured: one awake, the other still sleeping. The woman parts the curtains and recalls her parents and their quarrels

	Family car trips.
	Her parents sat,
	locked in silent combat, seething
	in the pilot and co-pilot seats.

In the penultimate poem FALLEN 1973, we are taken back to a point in the poet's memory when she was a seven-year-old attending Sunday school.

	Jesus — a snappy dresser
	in cranberry velvet, butterfly sleeves,
	Breck girl hair.
	And I dress up for Him

	because
	No One caught me.
	Nothing held me there.

The last poem HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE HALLOWEEN, takes the reader to the poet's prom night where she is

	Wearing prom pink with white gloves,

	hypnotised by
	my skirt spinning.

	and no one got nailed to anything.

Once you learn how to catch them you realize that these mortal themes underwrite all of EVERYONE LOVES ME. As you turn the pages, struck by the attentive observation of the behaviour of humanity, by the closeness of observation, and by the precise voicing of each line, you start to realise the gravity of the personal crisis each poem addresses. EVERYONE LOVES ME turns out to be pre-eminently a book about human relationships. Each of its poems suffused with a sense of love, loss, death and the poet's voice.