Selected Comments

"Kathy Shaidle possess a marvelous talent for making sublime sense of a world off its rocker. (...) her contemplative acuity and technical agility bespeak a courageous sensibility which shines luminously bright throughout these meditations. It's a rare writer who can find both harmony and chaotic beauty in figures as diverse as Jack Ruby, Frida Kahlo, Rosemary Kennedy, Thomas Merton and Leni Riefenstahl. Shaidle does precisely this in these arresting sequences demonstrating the poet's inventive brilliance."
                     —citation, Governor General's Award nomination, 1998
                        (judges: Judith Fitzgerald, Claire Harris, Douglas Burnet Smith)

"If there are better first books than Kathy Shaidle's this year I will... I will do such things! With entire seriousness now: these may be the best poems of this year from anywhere, period. Nobody writes lines better than these. I admire Kathy Shaidle's work immoderately."
                     —Don Coles, Governor General's Award-winning poet

"It's hard to decide what impresses me most about this dark, intense book. These are poems which have found ways to employ passion without sentiment, invention without obfuscation, philosophy and mysticism without smugness or oversimplification.
"Unlike most of her contemporaries, Shaidle neither rejects nor evades that most thorny and awkward of poetic responsibilities-the investigation of beauty. Hovering over Shaidle's tragic, doomed icons is a dark existential chill the Spanish poets used to call duende, an awareness of the lingering presence of death.
"This is a wonderful collection, long overdue."
                     —Kevin Connolly, author, editor, Arts Critic for eye weekly

"Kathy Shaidle has been around a long time, making various kinds of generally useful trouble... A book of poems is overdue and Lobotomy Magnificat is a noteworthy debut.
"Shaidle writes a cerebral Catholic poetry, filled T.S. Eliot-like with literary, religious and political allusions, sometimes obscure but always seductive. Smart, eerie and dark, the poems travel through detailed landscapes of struggle, duplicity, violence, illusion and evil. Shaidle's religiosity has more in common with the hellish triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch than the New Age salvationism on earth of The Celestine Prophecy (Shaidle also writes better than James Redfield.) ..."
                     —Libby Scheier, Toronto Star

Kathy Shaidle's works copyright © to the author.