The Antigonish Review
Issue # 122
Jeanette Lynes
Human Business - And Lots Of It
holding ground by Tanis MacDonald, Seraphim Editions,
2000. ISBN: 0-9699639-6-3.
The True Names of Birds by Susan Goyette,
Brick Books, 1998. ISBN: 0-919626-99-8.
Four Ways of Dealing with Bullies by Richard Lemm,
Wolsak and Wynn, 2000. ISBN: 0-919897-75-4.
What are poems about? This question was posed at a
writing seminar I recently attended. The answer - human business. A
truism, to be sure, but a worthwhile reminder, nonetheless. Three
new collections by poets Tanis MacDonald, Susan Goyette and Richard Lemm
offer rich breadths of "human business" expressed through lyric,
narrative, and hybrids of these modes.
Tanis MacDonald is a singer, a lyricist. Although
holding ground is her debut collection, her poetry has been published
widely, and her chapbook, This Speaking Plant, won the 1996 Acorn-Rukeyser
Award. MacDonald brings a deft hand to her craft and a humility to her
vision. Unlike the unevenness that sometimes plagues first collections,
the fifty-eight poems in holding ground are consistently accomplished
and memorable.
MacDonald is a versatile poet, equally at home
in spare lyrical poems such as "Given," "Drought"
and "Pointing out the Bluebird," as she is in prose poems like
"Cowgirl" and "Take This." Her poems of joy and celebration
move us as deeply as her poems of desire, longing and
loss. This versatility lends considerable range and emotional
depth to MacDonald’s writing. Even in ‘spare’ mode, the sensuous immediacy
of her writing remains uncompromised. Her metaphors are fresh and often
startling. "Given," the collection’s opening poem and one of
its most satisfying, reveals MacDonald’s metaphorical prowess:
I was a summer vacation
a cottage-country party
a Lake-of-the-Woods pine-filled
mosquito night
a midnight dance under a July moon
with the tall boy from Sault Sainte Marie
between them I sang
a thread of notes a string of words
In the final section of this ‘conception poem’, the speaker
imagines her birth through her mother’s perspective:
and she
took a thousand shallow breaths
and gave me away to the world,
crying
this hot coal
this speaking plant
this naked voice
is not mine
MacDonald’s collection begins with the emergence of her own
"naked voice;" that primal moment when a mother realizes her
child is a separate being - a high-energy opening. MacDonald’s energy
does not diminish throughout the book’s four sections: "A Blur of
Green," "Freestone," "One Kiss Leaves You," and
"A Half-Sea House."
Motifs of food, hunger, clothing and gardens form
unifying threads through MacDonald’s collection. Waitressing poems such
as "Service with a Smile" and "Cowgirl" are full of
panache and make their point about the political dimension of food; these
poems form dynamic counterpoints to "The Onion Eater" and "In
the Back Garden," poems of desire and ‘otherness’. "Desire"
in MacDonald is never saccharine or mawkish. "In the Back Garden"
is tinged with enough self-parody and whimsy to make it edgy, fun:
'now a craving for rhubarb
rules my palate. I hunt it down
in markets with a loaded wallet,
bear it home strapped to the roof of my car,
green ears waving down the highway,
long stalks placid and resigned'
We sense the influence of Lorna Crozier or Stuart Ross - but
we also bear witness to MacDonald’s uniqueness. Where else in Canadian
poetry have we encountered "the cry and call of wild rhubarb?"
When MacDonald merges earthy sensuality with
elegies and poems about human vulnerability, the effect is often stunning,
as in "Memorial:" "Hip-Deep in backyard raspberry canes,/I
search for sweet/flashes of red beneath/spiky stems and broad leaves.
Rare red nuggets ping one by one into my tin,/treasure in this overgrown
garden." This "search" becomes an expression of grief;
the poem evokes the aftermath of a friend’s funeral, contrasting the berries
to the apple tree "that sprouts no fruit but/the yellow balloons
we tied in his memory." "In Sorrow’s Kitchen" and "Mourning"
are also powerful elegies.
Several pieces in holding ground could
serve as poetic manifestoes. "Take This," arguably the strongest
prose poem, lays out an entire poetic universe - ground, garden, sky and
paper - ending with the creative imperative: "this is a gift, the
last you will receive'hold it. hold it." "Moving In," ostensibly
a poem about unpacking and setting up house, seems as concerned with a
kind of poetic attention:
There is no home but
what you make with
paint and whistles
at twilight, what
you stick together with
spit and splinters.
'
You must care for
each bent nail, each cracked
tile, the frayed
edges of carpets
and bones left in boxes.
"To My Milton Professor" articulates another important
aspect of MacDonald’s aesthetic - her feminism. Like other women poets,
MacDonald must confront the male literary tradition. There is an irresistible
wickedness here and, as in "Given," an image of poetic birth:
'I remember the last
of the men I called sir, the last
time I feared poetry -
no hard shove out of Heaven
but a scrawl in green ink, Your analysis
is not brilliant, but will serve
if you avoid these leaps of imagination,
and I tripped away, a mark on my
head full of rhyme.
However, the poet’s passion is tempered by humility, as shown
by the poem’s concluding lines: "Most days what I know is small/enough
to carry in my front pocket."
The final group of poems in "A Half-Sea House"
revisits famed females such as Medusa, Eurydice and Diana. Re-jigging
myth can be a slippery slope - or maybe it’s the recent saturation with
mythological figures in poetry - but MacDonald pulls it off well. The
collection’s final poem, "Classic Beauty," shows her ability
to make it new:
[Medussa] invests well, retires early.
She combs her green curls back,
moves to the coast,
opens a bookstore,
sells copies of The Beauty Myth
'
A sign on her shop door reads,
Here lives the beast.
Look on me, world
and discover.
"Discovery" is a fitting end to MacDonald’s first
collection. Let’s hope this poets sing her "thread of notes"
again and again.
Although published in 1998, Susan Goyette’s first
collection, The True Names of Birds, is still a ‘hot’ book. Birds
received considerable acclaim, including its inclusion on a Governor General’s
Award shortlist. This acclaim is warranted; Goyette’s is an original
and arresting voice in Canadian poetry. I don’t think I’ve read such compelling
poetry based on the domestic world since Bronwen Wallace. Like MacDonald,
Goyette probes those all-consuming, human questions: how do you live?
How do you make a home?
For Goyette, the world is an endlessly mysterious
text, an uncrackable code - "everything a sign," she writes
in "To Keep You Well." "November: The Sawing of Women in
Half" interrogates this notion of an over-arching system of signification
that will make everything make sense:
'There must be a formation
that calls to birds. Some magic seen from
the sky
that means rest. I haven’t learned it yet'
Later in the poem, we discover that "[s]ome people can
translate anything into music. I’ve had to/adapt." There is, of course,
no guidebook to life, as Goyette tell us: "There are books, encyclopedias
in the library/explaining every magic trick invented'nothing/about music."
Goyette plays effectively with the schmaltz of the magic show: "the
sawing/ of women in half, the bouquet of doves." In contrast to the
gimmickry, the bogus potential of ‘explanation’, there is the poem’s real
problem - how to translate the world into music.
For Goyette, poetry is the art of translation.
The poet-translator’s key tool is metaphor. Despite Goyette’s charmingly
self-deprecating gestures - "All I’ve learned is how to pull/handkerchief
after handkerchief from my sleeve/while someone else sings the blues"
- she is, in fact, a highly adept ‘translator’. Her metaphors are rich
and striking. In "Sisters," she writes: "We weren’t temples
or even bungalows. We were apartments." "Regret is a woman
who watches her reflection/in soup spoons and still water" ("Regret
and All Her Nightgowns"). Many of Goyette’s metaphors are spun from
the seasonal cycles and her close attention to the natural world. In "In
This January," she writes: "My dreams are shoeboxes/filled with
bones from my feet." Everyday activities accrue metaphorical dimensions,
as in "A Gift for the Winter God" where the speaker is knitting:
"Left alone, I unravel Autumn all the way/back to April and try to
pick up what I’ve dropped."
After inhabiting Goyette’s poems for awhile, their
weave of metaphors begins to spin into something even more profound: a
mythological milieu that defines and gives musical resonance to the poet’s
own life. This is how you make a home. The materials woven and translated
into a music for living are, in Goyette, as often drawn from domestic
objects as from the more esoteric world of nature. But the two are often
connected. In "October," Goyette writes: "October leaves
me with just a soup pot and a faint taste/of my mother. I make our home
from cards in my pocket, pull/coins from the backs of my son’s ears."
There is that schmaltzy magic again that Goyette both believes in and
doesn’t. Similarly, in "The Mythology of Cures," the question
of the artist’s authority arises: "I’ll create a mythology for this
house. Trust me." Is Goyette winking at us here? Yes and no. These
moments of self-irony point to an interesting tension between authority
and tentativeness that informs Goyette’s aesthetic. There is that self-assuredness
of voice in the collection’s title poem, for example: "There are
more ways to abandon a child/than to leave them at the mouth of the woods."
But these studied declarations function mainly as springboards into the
real business of the poem which is much more exploratory, open-ended.
The poems’ stated ‘premises’ are sometimes undercut by subtle irony or
silence. By the end of this poem - also the collection’s opening piece
- Goyette has moved us from ‘certain’ knowledge (which, as she knows,
is something we construct) into a hauntingly elegiac territory:
'Here is the stillness of forest,
the sun columning before me temple-ancient,
that wonder is what I regret losing most;
that wonder
and the true names of birds.
Goyette’s collection plumbs lost language, lost childhood.
The poem’s tentative moments of loss and silence are striking in the way
they open up possibility. But this encapsulization misses the strength
of humour in Goyette’s work. "Confessions" illustrates this
important counterpoint to the elegiac: "'please God of everlasting
love/and lambs,/please give me something to confess/and a Barbie camper."
Moments like this should not be underestimated; they ensure against earnestness.
Goyette has created a highly successful hybrid
blend of narrative and lyric. Her line is long in length, rich in cadence.
She is not a poet for quickie readings; her work demands time and slow
immersion. And it’s well worth both.
Four Ways of Dealing with Bullies is Richard
Lemm’s fourth poetry collection. Each section of the book - "Gillette
Time," "Jesus Honey," "Bandages," and "Tongue
Piercing" - forms a quadrant of the larger whole. Within individual
poems as well, the number four works as a structural principle. "Holidays
and Uncle Curt," for instance, is constructed as four slices of family
life contextualized within a tapestry of twentieth-century America. While
four-part poems such as "Holidays and Uncle Curt" and the book’s
concluding poem, "Small World" work well, Lemm is not enslaved
by strict numerical sequences. In fact, the bulk of Bullies consists
of free-verse, narrative-driven lyrics.
Because Lemm’s poetic voice has an appealingly
fresh, conversational, colloquial quality, it is easy to overlook his
technical virtuosity. His poems seem spontaneous, uninhibited, loose;
but a closer examination unpacks some savvy poetic maneuvers - in lesser
poets, the ‘seams’ or ‘underwear’ of these maneuvers might show, embarrassingly,
but not in Lemm. "Velocity," for instance, seamlessly integrates
four narratives, or narrative gestures (brief, imagistic evocations of
larger stories), all framed by "a routine/drug stop on the freeway"
which goes awry. But Lemm embeds, within the same poem: the speaker in
a car with his mother who is discussing her hot flashes and marriage;
the speaker’s dream of "searching for [his] childhood/dog, maimed
by a car;" and the speaker’s rather moralistic wife watching the
after-dinner news. The poem’s ‘glue’ is the car - the runaway car, the
mother-son car, the dog-maiming car and finally, the speaker’s car, seen
on the news: "live-action-proof, for a moment/part of history, then
leaving the scene." In this poem, Lemm has four plates spinning at
once with considerable velocity, and he doesn’t drop one. Nor does he
hit us over the head with didactic, sanctimonious pronouncements or succumb
to the temptation to explain the metaphorical significance of the car,
or how the chaotic edges of our lives catch, momentarily, and spark off
against each other like wild sprockets hurtling through the air. Lemm
lets his poems have lives of their own.
Since many of Lemm’s poems are political in their
thrust, his ability to back away from the preacher’s podium is all the
more admirable. Four Ways of Dealing with Bullies is a compelling
meditation on power and its numerous permutations - personal power, state
power, technological power, power-as-spectacle ("Gillette’s Friday
Night Fights") and so on. These themes have the potential to be abstract,
but Lemm grounds them in the particularity of his own experience and their
articulations through identity and family history. In other words, his
poems have, at once, a ‘bigness,’ a broad scope, and an authenticity of
detail and specificity. "Bringing It All Back Home," a poem
depicting a school kid’s response to air-raid drills during the Cold War,
exemplifies this fusion: "Once it was the Russians./At noon every
Wednesday I froze/gaping skyward when the air-raid/siren blared, just
testing, but/what better time to attack." The poem is marked by resonant
particularities such as "Mr. McGrath,/who sang the anthem at football
games" and "Sherry Payne," who "dropped/the gallon
jar of formaldehyde she was/bearing to the dissecting table." The
concluding stanza captures the emotional complexity of the experience,
that paradox of apocalyptic danger and predictable safeness that informs
contemporary existence: "I miss that siren/every Wednesday, testing,/just
testing, and the/empty sky."
Given Lemm’s prevailing theme of power, a key
challenge surely involves the poet confronting his own relationship to
it. This is where a weaker hand than Lemm’s could fall into over-simplified
‘us-them’ or ‘me-them’ dichotomies. The moral credibility of Bullies lies
in Lemm’s willingness to expose his own complicity in the regulatory
forces and inequitable relationships that epitomize western culture. If
the world has bullies, it also has underdogs, such as "Judy/McElroy
in her elementary ballet/of polio braces across the minefield/at school"
where "each step could detonate/ridicule." In "Metamorphosis,"
the poem from which the previous is excerpted, the speaker himself is
not immune to ‘bullyism’: "One morning we hide, snipers/behind
a porthole" [my emphasis]. Because "Metamorphosis" is the
collection’s opening poem, it seems important to Lemm to signal his speaker’s
complicity in this cruelty. The poem’s speaker is not looking down from
an elevated position, passing judgement; he is part of the fabric of his
society. And because the Judy McElroy sequence is set in a school, it
seems likely that Lemm is pointing out, early in his book, how deeply
violence and victimization are embedded in our social institutions.
The diction of warfare Lemm uses in "Metamorphosis"
- words like "detonate" and "snipers" - foreshadows
the book’s theme of militaristic oppression and the indelible presence
of war in the lives of twentieth-century North Americans. Contests between
males are treated playfully in the book’s title poem and others, but there
is no mistaking the gravity of war in "Passed Into Spirit" and
"Small World," the collection’s final two poems. These pieces
are from the section entitled "Tongue Piercing." In them, Lemm
situates his own family history within a violent century. These poems
move into elegy, and we sense the poet’s own tongue-piercing pain when
speaking of the tragic irony of his father’s life - the fact that he survived
"'miraculous/descents on parachute cords/into Normandy and Sicily"
("Small World") only to die "in a car on the highway/through
Tacoma, after three years at war,/wrestling to take control of/the wheel
from a drunken pal" ("Passed Into Spirit"). It is not only
Lemm’s personal elegy that the final part of the book evokes, but the
familial losses of several friends depicted in "Passed Into Spirit"
- and, by extension, all our losses.So how do you deal with bullies?
In the book’s title poem, and others, Lemm reaches back into his own ancestral
narrative for answers:
'Grandfather’s deadpan
reply to the gunmen
after they cleaned out his till and
just before they shot him:
I’ll get you.
The answer here: with words, the poet’s tool and (provisional?)
defense. As Lemm’s sobering and poignant collection suggests, language
is a loaded gun. But it is also an enabling "doorway" into our
"small world," our human family.
|
