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Carole Langille
Jonah's Promise by Adam Sol. Mid-List Press, Minneapolis, 2000. 68 pages. $11.00 U.S. Double Somersaults by Marlene Cookshaw. Brick Books, Ontario, l999. 84 pages. $14.00. Season of Mercy by Sally Ito. Nightwood Editions, B.C., l999. 69 pages. The Wedding House by Alison Smith. Gaspereau Press, N.S., 2000, 92 pages. $12.95.

Often poems I read in journals or in contemporary books are flat in tone and one dimensional leaving me disappointed and empty. So it was with great pleasure and gratitude that I read poem after poem of Adam Sol's collection, Jonah's Promise. These are important poems, located in time and place, offering both the pleasure of dynamic language and the surprising leaps for which one turns to poetry. Through detail, momentum, and tone these poems intimately capture Sol's experiences. His is a world deeply felt, where responsibility is not taken lightly. In one poem, "Jew in a New Suit", Sol describes the labour of his great grandfather and grandfather. He turns stereotype on its face:

How a Jew's money moves:
Houston Street,
Williamsburg, Brooklyn,
Forest Hills, Queens,
East Brunswick, New Jersey,
Connecticut, Connecticut, Connecticut-
    Sound of billfolds slapping shut,

    Refuge, symbol, pinnacle.

The poem ends:

Grandpa, I am reaping what you've sown.
It's your sweet fruit in my bitter mouth.

Sol's light touch and wry tone move his poems along at a brisk pace. In the poem "Bris" his inflection is perfect:

Then the child is returned to his mother,
and we move downstairs for bagels and whitefish as only
Teaneck can provide.

It is his great talent to bring events vividly to life in a few deft lines:

We sit in a circle while our leader, a senior,
plays sentimental melodies on guitar. ......
  He's having a thing
  with the Vernon girl whose brother dropped out of Dartmouth.

. . . . . .

Our leader is less than competent. He watches his fingers on the neck
as if they were someone else's hands, and the muted strings buzz.
 We respond with harmonic whispers. We are
  the Northeaster Federation of Temple Youth, on a weekend retreat...

Sol's poems have an intensity that only great poets offer. Note his gift for metaphor:

You should know, living so close to the hospital,
it takes nothing to break the night with sirens.

And he is not above laughing at himself. In a poem describing a disagreement he is having with his wife, while a debate is taking place on television, he says of the politicians on the screen:

They spend the rest of the evening
staring mutely at us while we wrestle
over the details of our new compromise.

This is Adam Sol's first book and was published after winning a poetry contest sponsored by Mid-List Press in Minneapolis. Such a book restores one's faith in contests. These poems work well together and make an elegant collection as he talks about family gatherings, memories from childhood, interactions with old friends, a service given by his wife, who is a Rabbi. Though many of his poems are about direct experience they go beyond the personal; the struggles of his Jewish family speak of the struggle every displaced family faces, his encounters with anti-Semitism address a darkness familiar to us all. In his deeply moving poem "Vienna March" the poet, visiting that city, repeats under his breath, for anyone not listening:

Jude Chai, Jude Chai, Jude Chai. Here in your sick, scarred city, a Jew lives.

I have one minor quibble. The first poem in the book, unlike other poems, has a strident tone. It is in the poems that follow that one will find Sol's largesse of spirit, his generosity, his tenderness. Keep reading. The book offers many rewards.

Double Somersaults is a book of great assuredness and confidence. In harmony with the title, the poems are acrobatic in their skill. The reader has a clear sense of who the poet is, a gratifying connection not found in the work of less skilled poets. "I want two mornings a day" Cookshaw says and I'm right there with her. We see the place she's made her home:

To live here is to live in a lantern,
So much clear fresh light

When the rest of the country's wrapped
In boots and down.

In "White Noise" she asks "What/ does this tell you about me? Too little, too much?" after she begins the poem with these musical lines:

How is it I am so unfailingly pulled
to scowling men, undershirted
in doorways, lean-jawed and liminal,
unsummoned, unshaven, unable....

Cookshaw does not hide behind the impersonal pronoun. She is not afraid to reveal and explore. In "Between Their Bellies and the World" she talks about women who have "reached a pinnacle of understatement." It is the poet's great accomplishment to write simple lines that say much. Her psychological insights are refreshing as well. Describing these women she says they.. "begin to confuse what they are/afraid of with what they don't/ like." And then she has a line that is totally unexpected: They "see the reason/ for everything and want desperately/to be sometimes wrong. To be essentially wrong." It is for lines like this that we savor Double Somersaults. And for her arresting metaphors as well:

And the Rugosa like one of Lautrec's dancers
throws her cherry skirts in the air.

In "Negative Space" Cookshaw writes:

Further up Selkirk
the faded bumper sticker reads
I    MY     .

The penultimate line of the poem reads: "This is what I wanted to say. I   MY    .

This is what I want to say again and again, myself! "I    MY    ." The reader is grateful to Cookshaw for such quirkiness.

My favourite lines are in the poem "Open and Close". Digging up a key she's hidden she says,

While I unearthed that
bit of brass, a night bird
whined a small two-syllable sound,
thin as a skipping rope flung

in orbit. Hunting or hunted? Whee whee.

In many of her poems Marlene Cookshaw is asking that question, "Hunting or hunted?" with great skill and courage.

What I like about Sally Ito's book Season of Mercy is her sincerity, her lack of cynicism. The problem for me with these poems is that they do not have the details to locate them in time or place and many of the words are opaque, pushing the reader out rather than bringing him or her into the poem. Here is an entire poem entitled "Constellations":

After the getting of our destinies,
it seems there could have been no other way.

All the hurts, denials, betrayals -

yes, everyone of them

accountable,
accounted for

as each star in the darkness is.

A long battle of constellations we are,
clinging clandestinely
to light after light
swinging back into darkness,
once more into mercy.

"Hurts, denials, betrayals" are not conveyed simply by using these words.

As the painter Paul Klee said, "art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible" and "A long battle of constellations we are" does not make visible. Do constellations battle?

Here is the first verse of her poem "Ash Wednesday"

Now then,
let us put on the spirit of our weakness,
bow down before the glory of our shame,
remember the dust
out of which the crown of thorns
took root, bore fruit
from the seeds of our fallen hearts.

The words of doctrine, "weakness, shame, thorns" are expected to convey Ito's unique thoughts, but do they?

There are some wonderfully surprising lines in the book, such as:

Of the snakes that already reside there,
leave them for they have earned their place.

There is nothing so unpleasant
as the breath of giants
down your back

so a crazy man told me.

From such lines we know Ito is a poet who listens and who greatly appreciates the unexpected.

Her poem "The Art Of Prayer" has many fine lines. It begins:

When you pray
  Take two stones
and breathe on them.

One stone for yourself.
One stone for another.

Clearly Ito has had experiences that confirm her faith and wants to convey them to the reader. I believe she would agree with Wallace Stevens who said, "The poet's role, in short, is to help people live their lives." Such aspirations demand the poet go beyond phraseology and abstraction and make the poem come alive through detail, perception, dazzling language. I believe she has the ability to go deeper and deeper, should she choose to, when she sings of "the small beauty and rage of the heart."

Congratulations to Alison Smith for her very fine first book of poems, The Wedding House. It is unusual to read work by a young poet that is so free of artifice and so confident. These are poems rich with rural speech and local characters. In her poem "By The Ground" she writes:

My mother would tell you
     That it is a sin
to wish yourself that Maud Lewis,
cripple in the eastern corner, selling
whatever piece of home you can paint

Smith has a wonderful ear and delights in the peculiarities of her subjects. She is free from the burden of taking herself too seriously. She ends with these lines:

Would that I now
Had that stake in the ground:
That miniature house to strip
     at least (you might say)
you would have climbed the drive
to buy this road-sale poem.

Her poem "What's Left" about working on a factory line, captures with great skill, the deadliness of tedium and monotony. She approaches this subject with insight and originality:

You may save your limbs
But in the factory
it's easier to lose a wife....
When you ask her for tea
You are yelling, when you touch
Her skin you are rushing
To peel calluses off......

These poems speak of relatives, family outings, family breakup, and her own partnership and marriage without sentimentality . She is an intelligent and optimistic poet. With a voice that is unaffected and richly textured, Smith infuses these poems with a deep sense of love. In "Toasts" she writes:

Here's to the parents who left me alone
When I said I hate you
Here's to them
That left me in the woods
When I wanted to be lost,
Who never scared me
From my seat in the pea patch....

I was moved by her astute observations and her empathy with people in her community. In "The Marriage License" she writes

It takes her ten minutes by walker,
swaying as if winded,
to get from her bedroom to where
we've been seated by her daughter
in the heavily curtained registry room.

Such details, which the poem is rich with, are themselves an homage to the world around her. This reverence for detail is true in the poem "Clara Freeman" as well and "Eliza", a poem about her grandmother. Smith is a deep pool stirred by the slightest breeze and her poems resonate with nuance. In one poem she writes: "I forget the food of absence" and one senses that much in this world is food for Smith, that she is not afraid to taste and drink deeply, that she is nourished by both disappointment and wonder. Perhaps some poems could have been left out of the book, such as "Beautiful Things" or "Two Faced" as they are not as strong as the others. The mystery here is how Smith has the courage to be so true to herself. I am certain this is the first of many books. Alison Smith is a remarkable young woman with an exciting future. The Wedding House will draw much praise.