The Canal Bed
Helena Minton
"...her poetry owes its power to control and extraordinary visual sensitivity."
—Kliatt
"Her poems confront a painful tangle of fear, loss, death, love, and sexuality in
sensuous imagery which, while charting defeat, also reaches through to metaphoric
identification with figures from the past—mermaids, Mary, Midas's daughter. The poems
in their energy resist a world of defeat."
—Choice
There is a kind of pure pleasure in reading Helena Minton's poems. She looks directly at the world of things and brings out their richnesses and meanings in images that are stong and natural. One of the great strengths in her work is the connection made between image and emotion, the sense of our relationships to objects, landscapes, past events, that are not only themselves but powerful reflections of us and our feelings.
—Sonya Dorman
about the author
Helena Minton holds an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a degree in library science. She has taught at UMass Lowell and Northeastern University. Her collections of poetry include The Canal Bed and Personal Effects, both published by Alice James Books. Helena Minton works as a librarian.
