Poetry, Biography, Film and Illustration Reviews
Apologetic for Joy
By Hiemstra-van der Horst
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2011
118 pp. $18
Occupations
By Chris Jennings
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2012
96 pp. $19
Apologetic for Joy is the work of a writer-painter, Jessica Hiemstra- van der Horst, who is as much indebted to U.S. artist Georgia O’Keeffe for her sense of imagery as she is to sister Canadian poets, Margaret Atwood and Dionne Brand, for her sense of cadence, or form.
Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Hiemstra-van der Horst has experienced various locales, including British Columbia, Botswana, Indiana, Michigan, Australia, Ontario, and Sierra Leone, where she currently lives. (Note: Sierra Leone was partly founded by ex-Nova Scotians, that is to say, Black Loyalists, who sailed from Halifax for the West African country in 1792.)
Along her roads taken, Hiemstra-van der Horst has studied linguistics, exhibited and sold her art, peddled ice cream, and learned that the simplest elements are also unfathomably, rapturously complex.
So, the “standing posture” that is the “starting point of any description of human anatomy” can be represented by 1) a “Hooker at a bus stop” or 2) “My mother sautéing onions,” or 3) “What is determined at conception, in that moment / when my father faced the wall, my mother / stood up to straighten the sheets.”
The interest in anatomizing scenes and moments, for trying to comprehend their resonances and repercussions, is a hallmark of Atwood, down to the insistence on concision: “Do I leave a mark on you / when I graze by your chair? / Children understand loneliness: / They sit in laps, cry / until they are empty.”
But there’s a Bohemian sensibility too, if disciplined by science (also an Atwood trait): “Do you think someday I will excavate / [Georgia O’Keeffe] from the desert and hold her up to the sky? Remember / how often she’s given us new ways to look at the moon / through a hole in an old bone. She gave me the recipe / for savouring blue…, / the silence of an empty skull, somehow / the pulse of desert.”
Hiemstra-van der Horst pens painterly poems that close in poignant observation or tease us with whimsy and absurdity. Some lyrics are stacks of delicate images: “The violin lifts / an auditorium with one string”; “a wave / spills over the side of the crystal bowl, and love, / love displaces even me.”
To move from anatomy to catalogue or inventory is to move from Atwood to Brand, and something of the latter poet’s approach shows up in Hiemstra-van der Horst’s longer, thicker, more descriptive pieces, often touching on an exotic experience: “I feel obligated to cut a cow in half, holler / hell. I should. But every time I’m flooded, I’m flooded with splendour.”
Or try this passage: “Songbirds trill from wires, / the circuitry of my laptop, the pole casting a shadow / on Oma’s stone, the stone that says / ‘I will sing—’”
Multitalented, Hiemstra-van der Horst has talent to burn. However, at times, her poetry is pretty-for-pretty’s-sake; or the perceptive becomes platitudinous. She need not apologize for joy; she needs to temper her Brand with her Atwood.
Chris Jennings’s debut verse collection, Occupations, is aptly apposite to Hiemstra-van der Horst’s linguistics-informed work. For his part, Jennings so distrusts language, I mean, conventional communication, that his poems seep ironic detachment from subject and sob self-consciousness about the act of writing.
But Jennings is not to be blamed. Our times are damnable; suit-and-tie warmongers bomb children (“accidentally”); mass media sell corporate fibs; banks get “bailed out” but nations face bankruptcy; “democratic revolutions” turn into rigged-vote dictatorships. How can anyone trust “everyday” language or “plain” talk?
Ambling through an estate auction, then, Jennings’s wry persona notes that “[Hazel’s] accumulated offerings / escape their sovereign chronology / and scatter in a creative entropy.” Sounds like dead Hazel’s hoard of goods is all jumbled up. Jennings could state this info directly, but chooses not to, to ask us to pay attention to the different registers of language, so that we also scrutinize official discourses.
In a sense, we’re back in the world—the trenches—of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922) and Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920): Except that, now, language itself is, Jennings fears, corrupt. Yep.
