Summoning by Jacqueline Bell
A Guest Review by Catherine McNeil
I congratulate Jacqueline Bell for winning the Raven Chapbook Contest 2025 with her elegiac, gorgeous book of poetry, Summoning. The chapbook also includes six of her sister, Judy Critchly’s west coast paintings.
From the very first page, she scores her lines musically on the page and cleverly uses repetition: “stained glass / a stain I wanted to carry … /” and later, “lilt of wings, lifting.” This is “the world caught breathing” that she shares with us, with grace that lingers “like a taste to savor—name it!”
Jacqueline combines words in an interesting fashion: water-tongued, starshine, and expressions like “this creaky lullaby” and “the moon that night / sighing on our bed”. She uses the hyphen in unusual ways in “galloping-horse-blue” and “wish-I’d- said-good-bye-blue.”
She quotes lines from familiar songs, nursery rhymes and other literature and climbs into the mind of her audience with lines like “your old ally, the body / has become secretive, resistant / gone underground.” Hers is an exploration of grief which saddens, reminding us of our corporeal state, and that we are all on the way down as our bodies age.
There are so many ways she conveys that absences of loved ones sing in her: “sorrow will rise is you, work its way out like a sliver / You have no choice—… / You will slump towards any trace of light.”
Then she turns around, plumps her reader up, reminds us how beautiful one’s earthly journey can be:
“perhaps when all the words have leaked away the thing itself remains in all its majesty — like that swan in the bay at sunrise, floating then lifting the ministry of its wings.”
Jacqueline asks us not to hang on too tightly to “our honeyed days.” Her words continue to sing life’s praises long after you have read them. We are all being summoned to bow to lyric beauty in her Summoning.
About the Author
Jacqueline Bell’s poetry has appeared in literary journals including The Fiddlehead, Grain, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Event, and in fourteen anthologies. Her chapbook Ubi Sunt was published in 2024 by The Alfred Gustav Press. Pax, won third prize in the Ontario Poetry Society’s Entitled Titles 2025 contest.
About the Reviewer
Catherine McNeil is an author living in Gibsons, BC and was the recipient of the National Milieu’s Emerging Writer’s Contest for her first poetry book under the influence (Bedazzled Ink) in 2016. emily and elspeth, her second book of poetry (Caitlin Press, 2023) won first prize in the Sunshine Coast Book Awards in the category of Diversity. Poems from emily and elspeth are in Queer Chroma, Rampike, Sinister Wisdom and Room of One’s Own. Other publications include Event, Capilano Review, West Coast Line, Exact Fare 2 and The Fed Anthology. Recently, she received first prize in fiction in the Sunshine Coast Not An Island Literary Contest.
Book Details
Raven Chapbooks, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7781603-8-7 $22.95
visit the website to order books: RavenChapbooks.ca