The Animated Universe is the long-awaited debut of a seasoned poet who
has traveled the world honing her craft and, in the process, settling
into the assurance and confidence in her voice. These poems reflect her
movement, but above all they speak to her core belief in the power of
empathy and compassion as aesthetic markers. In "signs" she writes,
"Everywhere I go/ I see the people I love in the faces of strangers, .."
Her poems range across three modes of seeing: the ode that reveals her
penchant for finding beauty in the unusual, in the ordinary and in the
disquieting things of the world; her legends, which are the
mythologizing of daily life that only great calypsonians and natural
storytellers are able to achieve; and finally, her lyric disrobing of
her heart, her soul and her body--a sacrifice she makes with heart
because of her strong conviction that the sharing of self is a healing
quality of poetry: "I am a figment/ of God's imagination. / I am more
than/ I say. I am./ I am who I am/ becoming." If there are echoes of
Ntosake Shange here, it is because, like Shange, Thornhill understands
the deeply spiritual function of the poet, and she embraces the role of
the poet as a a priestess in service of the community. And yet, in all
of this, we find in Thornhill the splendid tensions and graces of an
immigrant's imagination and language, rooted as she is in her Trinidad
birthplace, and her uneasy American home. There is a throw-back quality
to her rhymes, invoking in the long-breathed journey to the satisfaction
of rhyme, the "def" stage, the spoken-world space during its emergent
height. But this is the beginning of the formal exploration. Thornhill,
the poet, was made by the energy and immediacy of the stage, a poetry
willing to improvise through elliptical leaps while being grounded in
sound, rich sound, and the satisfaction of the rhyme's reliability, and
above all, while grounded in the story, the tall tale, the myth-making.
