Marrow, Willow (2011) is already Maureen's third collection of poems. Her first book Rough Skin (1996) won the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Award for Best Book of Poetry and together with her second book Harm's Way (2001), she was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards and appeared in various literary journals across Canada (just to mention some awards and honours...). She has been Writer-in-Residence at the University of Prince Edward Island and a judge herself to several poetry contests and awards. And she isn't limited to a Canadian audience: she also won one of Britain's major Poetry Awards, The Petra Kenney Poetry Award, and has given various workshops and readings abroad. Astonishingly, given the fact, as she recalls in the same interview that, when one of her poems were rejected by a campus journal during her undergraduate years, her resolution was: '"That's it, I'm not a poet."'
Not so astonishingly, given her resolution, she first turned to writing fiction when she recovered her creativity later on. Her first published work Letters from China (1981) had been a memoir/travel book of her time as an ESL/EFL teacher in China. Furthermore, she had various stories and (academic) articles published, but: still no poems. Surprisingly, Maureen turned back to poetry in times of trouble and obstacles: writing poetry can feel "like [...] climbing onto a stable and supportive raft in a troubled sea." (MH on BCP). A beautiful explanation that writing poetry means more to Maureen Hynes than shaping beautifully rhyming images and it wouldn't be her if she wrote from a limited personal introspection. In combination with her work as Poetry Editor for the national labour magazine Our Times and having been engaged with various social programmes, she is able to see the big picture and to weave the personal with the political and produce "some magical poems" as M. Travis Lane (PoetryReview, 2011) concludes. Probably, it is her core approach to writing poetry which explains her successfully woven work of art and I would like to end her introduction with another citation and a video of Maureen reading:
"The ability to create art out of language, to shape it, with form, into not just something that's beautiful, but something that also resonates with us emotionally and is taken into the core of our beings and remembered - that is something that feels urgent and compelling to me." (MH on BCP )
*CBP = BlackCoffeePoet: take time to check his blog - he has a very interesting approach to poetry as well.