Issue 152 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

Poetry is alchemy; it cracks open the quotidian and teaches us how to pay attention. In the collections here, all by multi-award winning poets, the reader's listening eye is rewarded with three different poetics, each carrying its own astonishment and delight.

All readers come from somewhere. Rilke's often-quoted comment on criticising works of art - "only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them" - describes where I stand. As a seasoned teacher and always-apprenticing poet, I believe, like Bachelard, that criticism can too often put the mind in a "second position, destroying the primitivity of the imagination." Reading to stay open, to imagine with another poet, teaches me, invites me to wade in the river rather than watch or throw stones from the shore.

This late-summer evening as I read Sue Goyette's Undone again (and again), what comes to mind is the long elastic sweep of a line over bright water: her work has the solitary beauty of fly-fishing, yet it is rich with characters and a sense of home. (Her long lines, by the way, are accommodated in the book design - applause to Brick for the seemingly radical practice of letting the work itself determine format). Goyette's elegant cast and expansive reach explore loss and letting go: how do we manage these, or do they manage us? In "New Year's Eve, 2001" she reminds us that " … eventually even the night steps back, / turns into a pale, last star with all we're left of it slowly burning out." "Patience" cuts to the essence:

Soon the hour of dry, folded towels, the hour of the empty
house will chime. Respirer. And in the silence, your heart,
there are the hands of many memories working. Time

is the gasket, the thin slice of hope that fits between
the pieces. Here it works its quietest skill of undoing,

of slowly sorting what to keep
and who to let go (141)

The passion and grief in Goyette's poetry is embodied, and can be knee-buckling: "There is a hunger in us, / I think, for tragedy," she writes, and she cultivates our awareness of it in kids' fingerprints, a discarded cardigan, the loops of a knot tying and untying, spiders carried outside in a young man's hands. Her words reach under our ribs, shake us, the reverberations threatening our own undoing.

Imagine waking up and hearing crying,
that quiet sob of despair and rushing through
the house, then remembering. Looking out

the window to see only moonlight and concrete
      (Jack Gilbert's Divorce, 21)

Undone is a long, deep breath of a book, capacious, balancing optimism and the threat of despair. Goyette's eye for what Bronwen Wallace called the stubborn particulars, along with her heart-stopping metaphorical leaps, show us grief as tender gestures of the everyday. This collection follows The True Names of Birds, Goyette adding strength to strength. Her wisdom here is in showing us how we keep on keeping on, our arms, like her long lines, reaching into the depths, gathering, reaching again.

Loneliness is evening's natural resource. Entire lifetimes have been spent drilling offshore / of memory.

"Marry me," evening, down on its knee, begs dawn. And dawn, with a little secret of its own, / agrees. ("A week" 134)

Sue Sinclair's spare and brilliant poems are lessons in economy: the fine elegance of ink line drawings or the meditative clarity of contemplative photography. "At night, the stars shine /like a cure that won't be discovered / for years" ("Flatrock, January 1, 2002": 50). "We are like smoke / rising into the world. Thin and quick / to lose ourselves" ("Prayer I": 47). The spaces between her philosophical observations are always apt, her moves deft and accurate. But there is also abundance in the accuracy, like a room quietly filling with light.

A spider spins a web simply to show
there is a perfect fit between all things.
The space between the porch and the rosebush
requires no adjustment. Between the rose
and its corollaries: earth, light. ("Witness III": 24)

Sinclair's evocations range from haiku masters ("heavy as peonies, / petal-thick rain", "Harbour View": 36) to Dorothy Parker ("Water will drown you, / fire burn, air escape you", "Elements": 18). The images are true and intimate, and the reverberations, as Bachelard says of poetry, "touch our depths even before they stir the surface."

We travel quietly, so as not
to draw attention to ourselves. The waves
slip like thread
in and out of the eye of a needle.
(Second View of Bell Island, October, 2001: 78)

Reading Sinclair has always been, for me, like lying in an open field, watching the sky, and waiting. The practice opens us to depths we couldn't otherwise have imagined, and when we get up again, we often see the world around us with the precision of a diamond-cutter.

Sinclair refers to her youth ("At twenty-nine, already / I could spend all my time pondering what little / has happened to me" "Suffering": 56), yet is aware of "the shadow that comes / earlier these days." (83), aware that "Dusk presses / at your back" (85). "Sometimes the soul / wants to be all windows" (40), she writes, and in her case, it is. Her philosophical observations are startling and transcendent; her gaze, although measured, is expansive. This poetry is all windows: so clear and sharp at times that language disappears. This is Sinclair's follow-up collection to the award-winning Secrets of Weather and Hope; and, like Sue Goyette's work, can leave me speechless, marvelling.

God's lesson - his absence, that's
what we feel now. Religious vertigo,
dizziness that is the same
as being empty,
that is not the same as doubt
or belief.

("The Twelve Days of Christmas": 67)

A.F. Moritz's Night Street Repairs is his sixteenth collection of poetry. His landscape is the world - historical, cultural, classical; his gaze sweeps from Astrakhan to Mexico City, from the Bible to Don Delillo. P.K. Page's cover comment that Moritz is "a poet of high seriousness - rare in this quick and confessional age" gives me pause. Aren't most poets confessors, and serious? Yet it is true that Moritz has a panoptical gaze, intense, compassionate, and scholarly in the best sense (that is to say, the work is free from that insular high-fiving scholars can indulge in).

"To see the day" is the blues, walking. The weaving of city rhythms, the material and the interstices, is fluid, touching dark and light, and somehow manages - how does he do it? - to sing down the whole world.

           Marvellous sea of day,
producer

dandler of night, suspense of every horror and every pleasure, all
equal, the things unjoined

floated in me, I joined them because I wanted to and nothing
avoids my alms.

"North American Song" shows us his trenchant wit:

I have a mild case of everything.

I starve a little but not like they do in Ethiopia.
Life is empty for me but not like it is in Sweden.

I find I take longer with Moritz's work than others', but the effort is worth it. Two sections in this book ("The End of the Age" and "Hymns") pull me in for their particular critique of modernity and their elegiac meditations on the universe itself. "Five Hundred Cities" haunts me and "On a Sentence About the Ancient Maya" provides one of the best contemporary commentaries I have read:

         Someone had to design,
before the stamping, each groove in your steering wheel,
the equally elegant radio dial, and the squeal
of the radio singer. We alone have imagined art
so powerful imagination can't get out.

"Clear Stream" might describe Moritz's own work and its effect.

The water's clearness
offers the eyes the profound depths of fable.

And quick fishes,
lightning flashes, dream themselves and disappear.

We are left, near the end, with the moon and its "dumb fellowship," a "rocky / satellite where people have walked and thrown away / their garbage, making the same use of it / as they do of earth." A refreshing take on poets' perennial topic, "To the Moon" addresses the rock as a sign

         so like us
even when brightest you darken and hide
whatever's deepest in you, and endure this failure

Moritz's antennae is wide-reaching, and strong: a semiotic magician, he is masterful in his ability to collapse time and dreams in slender lines.