Anne Simpson
Three Women Poets
Nights on Prospect Street by Heather Pyrcz, Gaspereau Press, 1999
Anthem by Helen Humphreys, Brick Books, 1999
Songs for Relinquishing the Earth by Jan Zwicky, Brick Books, 1998
At a time when new poets are emerging and established ones are making their mark, there is no difficulty in choosing fine poetry books to review. Among these, Heather Pyrcz's Nights on Prospect Street, published by Nova Scotia's fledgling Gaspereau Press in 1999, reveals strengths that will only grow with subsequent books. The powerful Anthem, by Helen Humphreys, came out from Brick Books in 1999. Jan Zwicky won the 1999 Governor General's Award for Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1998), boosting Brick's profile still further.
Heather Pyrcz's poetry is deceptively simple. Her best pieces resonate beyond the confines of the lines. "Lilac is the Smell of Nightfall" is one of those poems, "an elegy of sorts" for an abandoned infant who "lived and died within the page ofnightfall." Here Pyrcz is able to move the reader into a silence that haloes the poem. "Visions Before Midnight," too, is a meditation enhanced by brevity. Language can't contain what the writer sees, yet the poems are in no way diminished by this fact. "The Boiling Beauty of a Common Day" tells more, with unrestrained emotion that could be allowed to surface more often. Certainly Pyrcz has a range that allows her to move from the suggestion of humour all the way to intensely realized vision. "Into the Interior," an account ofthe expedition of tyrrell's horsemen in the northern barrens, reveals her ability to imagine "the unimaginable."
One distressing problem is the lack of punctuation in this book, not to mention an absence of incisive editing in other, more fundamental ways. Some of the poems are merely intriguing ruminations, and the book suffers from the inclusion of such works as "Virtual Questions," a poem about the Information Highway. There are five questions in this short piece and no real answers to any of them. On other occasions the final lines do not wrap the poems with resolutions. "The Rainy Season," one of a group called "Nocturnes," could have ended prior to the rather flat couple of lines: "but it has come / the season of rain." As well, some lines constitute fragments rather than entire poems. Still, Pyrcz is a poet who bears attending to, not only in the Maritimes, but further afield.
In her fourth book, Helen Humphreys chants, sings, shouts the "Anthem" of the title. This is a book that should have received much more attention than it has thus far. With a spare elegance - matching the Betty Godwin piece reproduced on the cover - Humphreys is doing what most poets only imagine doing. She takes poetry back to its bones in lines like these: "Wanting is a word that fills / and empties, a word that, like the sea, remembers / itself each time differently." And not only does she pare poetry to clean lines, her sentences are supple and concise: "Every lover is a thief." The words are deliberately devoid of sentiment, yet they manage to convey an eroticism that consistently nudges language into the unruly, though the poet never allows this to happen. The strength of this book lies in its restraint, charged with things that are wild and unspoken.
Anyone might buy this book on the basis of one poem alone. "Chinchilla" invents and re-invents itself, like a short film in which the same thing happens in similar, yet slightly different ways each time. There is a narrative line, but one which defies the usual way in which we tell stories: "This is what I have remembered, all of it / suspect. I'm lying to you. Please believe me." This is a poem, after all, not a story. And Humphreys holds language accountable, pointing it back at itself. She does this frequently, with varying success. Sometimes a consequence of this is to pull the reader out of the poem, with a phrase such as "The words / are associative, not descriptive." But in "Witness," the strategy works: "It is words you still believe, / ones you can die inside." Certainly these are poems that make us believe in words. And in Anthem Humphreys sounds their depths.
Jan Zwicky's Songs for Relinquishing the Earth has a reach that, like Anthem, stretches the envelope of language. In this book, she moves well beyond an earlier collection, Wittgenstein Elegies. These poems seem as simple as plainsong, but they have the effect of an axe chopping through light and breaking it into pieces. Here is a book that no doubt cost its author; the poems come to us from a place of knowledge and anguish. She moves lightly through the wreckage, but we are aware, always, of what's been ruined: "there is sadness in the world... / past telling."
There is no question that the intelligence operating in each of these poems is demanding. It calls the reader to attention again and again. We are never off the hook: "Because the signs are not wrong: you are here." On the whole, Zwicky is able to achieve this without the earnestness that might attend the deeply serious. The note preceding "Kant and Bruckner: Twelve Variations," though, runs the risk of explanation. It is not absolutely necessary to a reading of the poem. What Zwicky does extremely well is pair the familiar with arresting moments of revelation: "there was blood, blood everywhere, we hadn't realized, / by the time we noticed, rivers of it, / nothing could be done." She is also capable of playful juxtaposition: "Don Cherry crossed with a chickadee, a polka / for demented gargoyles, our dead dog, our dying friend..."/P>
Her language is as unadorned as the cover of her book. Such plain diction, kept deliberately general, rather than specific (as with the use of words like "something" or "nothing") coupled with generous lines, works as a kind of springboard into deeper reflection. The lines accrue in intensity as they accumulate meaning, often in long, apparently meandering, sentences. But these sentences do not wander. They tack back and forth between possibilities, fending off easy conclusions as they move towards final insights: "nothing between us and the bare floor of the self, and then / the thing that cannot happen / happens, the thing that no one sees: / some place past emptiness / we take another step."
There is a reason why this book won the 1999 Governor General's Award for poetry. This is radiant language; these words are made of light. Sometimes they sear the heart.
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