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Antigonish Review
# 127
| Crystal
Bacon |
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Suddenly Struck Dumb by the Way of Harm: Four Bricks in New
Canadian Writing
Harm's Way by Maureen Hynes. Brick Books, $14.00
A Sudden Sky: Selected Poems, by Ulrikka S. Gernes,
edited by Patrick Friesen and Per Brask. Brick Books, $14.00, 111pp.
Trouble Sleeping by Phil Hall. Brick Books, $14.00,
77pp.
The Fat Lady Struck Dumb by David Waltner-Toews. Brick
Books, $14.00, 128pp.
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If there is one thing that unifies these four new volumes from Brick
Books, it is the richness of their variety in tone, style, form and effect.
Maureen Hynes' Harm's Way offers simplicity of language, musicality
and a subtle threading effect across the volume. The title poem contains
in its lines the book's four section titles and weaves together harm's
various ways, which are later pulled out and unwound to reflect an intimate
look at what may lie ahead to harm us.
Through lost parents, worldly pressures, the foreign, both at home and
away, Hynes sees beyond what life presents into its otherness. Some of
the poems touch on the unconscious in a way that is seductive and cool,
like a dream of a dream, as in these lines from "Lie perfectly still.
Turn on the light."
I have been swimming in the dark seawater
of dreams
and now my body contains the dream as
a shore
contains a lake. I hold the dream rippling
in my arms, rest my head against its
lapping. Lie perfectly still.
"Dreams," she tells us, "assume you are multilingual
/ that you understand the body's conversations" (What Dreams Assume).
The body converses nightly, if these poems can be trusted, with the very
core of loss: "the face of the former beloved / visits you in a dream
just before dawn" (When the face of the former beloved); "She
sings the same long touch / in the ramshackle dream / hotel" (Lip-Synching,
Two Performances); "This morning for the first time / I dreamed you
alive again" (In the Bottom of the Boat). These poems are elegies
rich in lyric knowledge of what it means to lose.
Hynes' strength lies in the resonance of images within and among poems.
Like dreams, threads of driving, weather and travel, are woven throughout
the book. The first three poems in the collection set the wheels in motion:
"Three hours of hesitant driving / along guardrails" (Precaution),
"a tiny piston that fires in every fibre / poops out and you barely
/ notice . . . the car still makes / its turns" (The molecular level
of kindness), "Middle of the night, tires spinning / against the
slight icy rise of my street" (Lie perfectly still. Turn on the light.)
She's on the road, back in China, Uganda, Saskatchewan, Otonabee. "The
road bares its vertebrae between / the snowdrifts . . . your mother drove
her VW beetle into . . . the blankets at the nursing home" (Driving
into the Blizzard). And that's just the first section. The remaining three
sections please in just the same way. Hynes looks and looks until the
book becomes a kind of panorama. Page to page, she is someplace where
we can count on her recognition of what binds experience to us: tires,
bullet holes, stars; bones, blood, dreams. There is nothing timid in these
poems; they domesticate the grotesque, bringing it close for our examination.
Norwegian poet Ulrikka S. Gernes' retrospective collection, A Sudden
Sky: Selected Poems, is a collaborative effort among Gernes and her
two editors, poets Patrick Friesen and Per Brask, who selected the poems
from Gernes' eight collections and collaborated with her on the translations.
The poems in Sudden are airy and abstract, like pinching smoke.
This is not to say, however, that they lack substance or context. Jeanette
Winterson's novel, Written on the Body, asks: "Why is the
measure of love loss?" That question resonates in these poems.
Like Hynes, Gernes' themes touch on dreams and death, love, loss and
memory. They differ, though, in the poems' structural thrust: where Hynes'
lyrics are moored by narrative gestures, Gernes' subdue story in favour
of impression. The effect is eerie. She favours such images as bones,
dust, blood, moon, nails, pupil. One of the oddest images in the book
occurs twice in twenty pages: "a room without eyelids" (Exile,
YOUR NAME IS WRITTEN). It's a fitting image for this book, which forces
us to look whether we like it or not. And there's plenty to like.
Structurally, the poems are risky and intriguing. For the most part,
Gernes omits punctuation and lets the poems' syntax move meaning vertically
through the poem:
for a moment I'm forgotten
a second or less
on a balcony at night
in a strange city
behind shutters in a room
wedged between rooms
out of a sudden sky
(from Scriptures, 1989)
This is not where the meaning stops, but it is a good illustration of
Gernes' control. Prepositions do their (too often thankless) work moving
meaning as well as containing it, giving the lines integrity.
These poems are ultimately about the body and the mind in the body:
"alone / with bodies that have left / fossilized traces / of life
and presence / in this rusty hotel bed / that answers / even the smallest
breath." If the body is a "momentary tool" (Exile), then
it is also a fully sensual and sensuous tool. Loneliness lives between
its legs; it wants a lover's face to scar it. These poems speak of love
as an impossibility that we can't live without.
Her poems' speakers are alternately lost and found, seeking and abandoned,
they live in memory, separated from the objects of their affection by
distances both real and imagined: " How much longer / can I live
through a memory . . . Out there / you run back and forth / flail your
arms / carelessly . . . in a savage dance / never looking / over here"
(At the Window). "I send you / the frozen presence of my eyes / from
rooms / I left / long ago" (November). The poems succeed in rendering
the experience without the suffering. The poems are vicarious; they share
sorrow through elegant gestures.
A good collection forms an arc from start to finish; it is architectural:
poems construct spanning structures that link themes, styles and forms
across the pages. The architecture of Phil Hall's Trouble Sleeping
is the most unique among the four volumes. The collection reads like a
novella, interspersing poetry and prose. The book is prefaced with a note
citing the Japanese form, the haibun, which traditionally combines
haiku and prose to tell the story of a journey.
Trouble Sleeping chronicles Hall's early life growing up in "not
the late Fifties like the calendars said, not for a long, poor, rural,
while . . . turn-of-the-century-Ontario" (36). It's a story of "If
only's," things which, had they not happened, might have made for
a different story. "If only I hadn't been forced to swallow a
teaspoon of my own urine...If only Good Cec hadn' t made me shoot
the dog...If only he hadn't left the skinned carcasses...If only my cousin
had kept off me...If only my oldest sister's two-month-old daughter, Nancy,
hadn't ..."
Like many novels, Hall's haibun happens as much in the interstices
between pieces as it does in the writing itself. It requires a suspension
of disbelief, a trust that the pieces will coalesce, and they do. The
world portrayed in these poems - because even the "prose" is
really poetry -is harsh and beautiful. It's the world we all inhabit,
but seldom see unless we have been cast out of the snug circle of the
"fortunate." Our gain is also our loss, however, as Hall shows
in his ability to transcend the larger culture's perceptions of his "kind"
by using the broken pieces of dreams, families and opportunities to reflect
back a thing made more beautiful by its fragmentation:
Spearing pineapple rings from a can with a stick
piqued by the moment's tenacity - its appropriation of
the wrecking yard around the epiphany
I have unfolded the road map of the axhead
& found even in its wagon ruts & foot paths
the same devotion to flung balance - the same hierophany
a tree displays in its cold twigs & seed tips &
unfullblown asymmetrical ornament-hammered gasket-
crumbled
(Father a serial killer of pets
Mother a falsie shielding a prone tick) (27)
Hall's ability to effectively mix metaphors and drop names jars and croons
all at once: "an old projector . . . burns an orange Bonanza-hole
/ through the soap-bubble of Jean Seberg's head / in Breathless"
(51). "(Czeslaw Milosz) / History playing Red Rover with // the name
for things" - aaas / & thethethes calling each other
// over - Sirs & forgotten Givens & / mobs of Nicks trickling in along"
(33). "Where wings once caught poor sinners like us / billowing Tennysonian
mounds" (39).
Boxer, Tippy, Chico, Sugar, Toby, Dobbin
Dobby, Mimi, DeeDee, Princess
Little Johnny Fucker-Faster, Rusty Warren, Uncle Bobby
Sweet Daddy Siki, Whipper Billy Watson
Wilf Carter, Hal Lone Pine
addle-daddle, bullrod (35)
"[B]ullrod" he says, "(my word for everything
then)" (15). It's a good word, too, to sum up what the rest of
the world tries to pass off as the truth.
David Waltner-Toews' The Fat Lady Struck Dumb is an aptly named
book implying that "it's not over" and won't be over anytime
soon. The book is copious at 114 poem-pages with most of the poems two
to three pages in length. In this way, it differs from its Brick peers.
Nothing about this collection is spare; Waltner-Toews has been many places
and seen a lot, and he packs his impressions into his poems with language
that is loose-limbed and well fleshed. Even a poem that appears spare,
like "Here, Not Here," ranges:
David Porter is all - muscles, heart, mind - all there
in the predatory bite of the February air;
skiing among shadows
on the rolling snow,
winter's jaws fall loose and warm,
the buttery sun charming
him into green and rocky
water falling thoughts
The sentence goes on for another two and a half lines. The poem spends
itself lyrically while suppressing the narrative, yet the poem's closing
image resonates with elegy: "this crust, this cup of still, cold
tea."
His veterinary training give him images of totem animals: voices like
"muffled pink / pigeons"; a heart "like birds throwing
their soft bodies against / the plate-glass of my living room"; "On
the Death of a Father... you quiver like a small hairless mouse;"
"the cat is like a day that waits for you".
He sees nature through science; all the parts of the closed system relating
to each other. These lines from "Death of a Naturalist" illustrate:
"All night outside our cabin / the sea-tongues sing / of love and
death, / of jellyfish and fishermen, / of whales and sailing watchers,
/ of diatoms, mud shrimp, sandpipers" (17). Or "all those things
/ that should have been in your poetry" and end up in dreams: "a
walking dandruff rabbit mite, Cheyletiella, / the sheep fluke,
Dicrocoelium dendriticum" (83).
His science-eyed examination of sex sets the collection apart from its
peers. "When a man and a woman / love each other / they are like
two confused / caterpillars" (Love and Chaos). When he says, in "Bringing
Home the Groceries," of the woman behind the checkout counter, "you
want to be inside her," he means it. "You imagine yourself in
a gelatin capsule . . . You would not believe all the wild places / there
are in an ordinary person."
You can believe it when you read these new books. These four poets are
each, in their own way, just ordinary people living ordinary lives. What
separates them from the rest of us is their extraordinary vision, seeing,
in the daily "getting and spending," the world's terrible beauty
and not blinking.
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