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In “Unzipped Valentine,” a playful treatment of Eros and his arrows, Eller fight back only as a poet can, by playing with the word ‘quiver’:  ... “this year/we quiver...”

Besides the classical poetic styles, Eller reaches back to Classical and pre-Classical times.  In “The Lamentations of Isis,” she takes Egypt’s primordial myth and conjures up Isis with all her pain of loss within the context of Wisdom.  In “Armageddon’s Bride,” a personality splintered from the Book of Revelations, Eller cleverly shifts from the common people who are the usual victims of Armageddon, to the innocent bride waiting for the “crimson knight”, whose touch will “gain her wisdom.”  Eller, like many thinking and feeling people, puts behind her the threat of the Whore of Babylon and recognizes her as the new feminine principle risen after an age of religious repression.

In “Come My Lover,” Eller creates notable lines such as “You’ve learned to murmur / recitations of your own rising” and “before the morning lifts its lids / and tries to catch us with its glare....”  Jungians will immediately recognize the lifelong dance of the Ego and Animus, a relationship that needs constant work.  It is soon followed by “The Alliance ...,” another well composed Ego-Animus story, not so veiled this time.

The kingpin or the keystone of this collection is “The Lion and the Golden Calf: A Vision.”  This is the poem from which the book takes it title.  It successfully tackles the immense chasm between Western and Eastern spirituality in four short stanzas, rhyming abba.

In “The Henges’ Kiss” Eller continues to spin cycles.  In this three part poem, “Lead me to the wood-rot rings” give us a clue right off that we are dealing with a wood-henge in an abbcca rhyming pattern.  In the first part it is the poet who kisses “these timbered feet!”  In the second part, about a stone henge, it is still the poet who kisses “those sarsen stones!”  In the third and final part, however, the poet lives and dies, “from life to death to life I pass” through cycles of reasonless seasons.  Unspoken, the poet establishes the everlastingness of all things with cycles: through her own cycles she makes the henges everlasting as well!

Love and pain, the latter often caused by love, or a lack of it, are recurring cycles in Eller’s poetry.  In “The Ivy and the Rose” Eller hints that “divine entanglement” may be assured by quantum entanglement, but hopes so is love!  Whereas quite a few previous poems dealt with love spurned, here “we are spurred on with each sunrise/ to reach out and touch again.”

The modern world is well represented, particularly the pressures and illusions of Christmas.  “A Christmas Mosaic” features fragments of Christmas scenery like “fragrant gingerbread” in “a child’s visionary landscape” all “in the shadow of a cross”, whether that cross be that of Christ or “...a silent war/  over the high price of gifting...” or the “six Canadians killed/ by a suicide bomber” in Afghanistan.  Another ‘modern’ poem, Wintry Shrub,” is a brief palette of winter reality “frozen in numb solitude.”

Eller’s collection, on the whole, is a wonderful read.  She calls upon her muses, Robert Frost, Wm. B. Yeats and John Donne and seamlessly shifts to travels within her soul.  Love and loneliness spin along with impertinence and defiance, allowing the reader a variety that is always welcome to make a poetry book readable and valuable.

~ Daniel Kolos, Egyptologist, Author, Poet and Documentary Writer.

Member of Highway 4 Writers, Words Aloud Poetry Cooperative, The Ontario Poetry Society and the League of Canadian Poets.