Circle Tour
by Eva Tihanyi
Inanna Publications
130 pages
$10 digital, $19 print
Gentle and delicate, Eva Tihanyi’s ninth poetry collection, Circle Tour, offers nature- and art-focused poetry without shying away from the difficulties of our current reality. As the title suggests, Tihanyi takes us on a “circle tour” through the outer and inner circles, and arrives at the centre in the third section. The entire collection consists of lyric free verse, with mostly short, concise poems (with a few exceptions).
The book’s first poem, a short two-liner titled “Hope” reads “If you’re reading this / you’re still here.” This poem establishes the gentleness of Tihanyi’s voice throughout the collection, a tone that is important to set up as she delves into the reality of death in a climate-and Covid-rattled world. A number of poems are posed as questions, from the series in “Do You Know” that ask “Do you know you’ll be outlived / by glass and metal, Styrofoam and plastic?” to “Would It Be Enough” a few pages later, which asks “Would it be enough if you / allowed chance to teach you flight and freedom?” The questions fluctuate; there is room for the despair and anxiety of the world alongside the hope proclaimed in the first poem.
The motif of physical circles appears across a number of poems, taking shape as the eye, the earth, the moon, the sun, and halos. The first section, “Outer Circle,” focuses on cosmology and the world of art, including poems about Marina Abramovic, Gloria Steinem, and more. The second section, “Inner Circle,” delves into family, with the speaker’s grandmother, mother, and son making an appearance. Circle Tour comes full circle in the third section, “Centre,” with a focus on interiority and the self. Tihanyi positions love and fear side-by-side in the last poem, “Spiral,” as she writes: “Everything you love / is what has happened to you. // Everything you fear / is what has happened to you.” In what is a very philosophical collection of lyric poetry, the physicality of circles makes the collection feel grounded.
The family poems in “Inner Circle” are especially poignant. Tihanyi concludes “Conversations with My Son” with the lines “It will change your life, / which dark you choose, which light”—lines that hold an assuredness that is unsurprising given that this is Tihanyi’s ninth poetry collection. Her delicate poetry gives these moments of profoundness ample breathing room to settle into you, and leaves Circle Tour a collection that, amidst its considerations of grief, leaves you able to face the world with the same gentleness Tihanyi brings to the lyric.
