Travelling Light

Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes
Published in 2006 by Seraphim Editions

ISBN 0-9734588-8-7

About this Book

Building on the success of her first book, The Fires of Naming, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes has painted a captivating new set of poetic canvases. Vividly, and with delicate precision, Travelling Light illuminates the people, landscapes and art - across Canada, in Europe, and in Jamaica - that we are invited to love, admire, and participate in the process of re-creating. Seductive tones and rhythms (enhancing "the sensuality/ of text"), combined with sculptural formats, unite the images evoked in the inner eye with thoughts and feelings that together yield both pleasure and wisdom: "the gleam of/ unmapped realms/ in blues and burnt sienna;" "the gallery awash with/ polyphony/ and descant voice of rose."

From Blurbs:

In Travelling Light, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes explores “that dark place between nearly and not yet.” Throughout, light and water filter and refract observation, affording “the flipside/ of routinely normal/ a shift/ of perspective.” Soutar-Hynes facilitates this shift with the bends and breaks in her phrasings, and produces for the reader, from line to line to line, that satisfying pleasure of mutable, unexpected recognitions. … these poems risk a sloping boundary” of meanings, and play them out to fullest potential.
~ Maxianne Berger

Travelling Light lives up to the ambiguity of its promise. The collection is infused with luminosity and excites with a sense of movement in time and place, experiencing linguistic and cultural changes. … The passionate, multi-hued word-palettes’ response in Letendre’s paintings reveals a vision of reality that is its own art form. The poet’s muse finds inspiration from a wide-ranging repertoire of literary works, giving the collection an innovative character, a unique quality of style and substance, breaking new ground in the art of writing.
~ Mavis E. Burke, Ph.D.

Review Quotes:

“Erudite yet sensual, earnest yet playful, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes writes with the precision of a retired educator and the passion of a former nun. She is both. Her work is delicate and formal in the best modern style, imagistic and - dare I say it - difficult. It is worth probing and reading many times to reveal its hidden meanings.

“As with the title of this, her second book of poetry, Soutar-Hynes’ poems revel in double meanings: we can voyage unencumbered or we can move in and through incandescence - Travelling light accommodates both endeavours and rewards both approaches to the collection….

“Her work is deeply spiritual and yet fulsome and sensual, a tension produced by the many breaks in the line formats as she holds strictly to her discipline but bleeds meaning through erudite associations. It is a hard book to put down, and a satisfying one to read over and over.”

~ Source: Book Review of Travelling Light by Mary Hanna, The Literary Arts Section, “The Sunday Observer”, Kingston, Jamaica, June, 18, 2006, p. 22