Merrybegot Voices: A Dramatic Reading
A companion event to the 2020 Pratt Lecture, Merrybegot Voices: A Dramatic Reading brings Mary Dalton together with Mary-Lynn Bernard, Randy Drover, Elizabeth Hicks, and Andy Jones to read her celebrated collection Merrybegot.
A joyous celebration of the riches of Newfoundland English, Merrybegot is perfectly made for dramatic reading, a collection of soliloquies ranging in tone from the haunting to the profound to the hilarious.
The reading will take place on Tuesday, March 3, at 8 pm in the Cox & Palmer Second Space. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.
In The Fiddlehead, Patrick Warner has written that "Merrybegot’s language is fresh, sharp, musical, and loaded with meaning. At times the poems create the slightly hair-raising effect that you get when language performs in new and slightly unusual ways. How is it that they manage to have both a curatorial and experimental feel? Ultimately these 'small monologues' are true love poems to place. They will stand whatever time throws at them...." And in The Globe and Mail, Patrick Lane has written that "These are fast poems. They slip by quickly, yet once gone, still hold hard to the ear and tongue. They’re a mix of curse and blessing, the poems feathered as clean as newborn swallows as they dip and weave in the winsome cadences and idioms of Newfoundland. They are like something overheard in the street or at a table in a bar just after it opens, short as a joke and deep as a charm. [These poems] lift us from the obviously crafted, intellectual poem to an art that echoes the best of William Butler Yeats’s late poems, where he gave up artifice for the simplicity of joy and beauty.