Handfuls of Bone
By Monica Kidd
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2012
80 pp. $20
Mental Illness Poems
By Anna Quon
12 pp.
Handfuls of Bone, by Albertan-turned-Newfoundlander Monica Kidd, is her second book of poetry. But she has also penned two novels and a non-fiction work. Also a filmmaker and journalist, she specializes in experimental shorts and radio documentaries.
Kidd examines the world from the bird’s-eye-view of her training as a seabird biologist, career as reporter, current day-job as a physician, and her lived experience as daughter/descendant, wife, and mother.
The poems reflect these varied interests, but also show Kidd’s wide reading in Anglo-Canadian poetry, especially that which is Atlantic Canadian, nature-oriented, and/or feminist.
Although she shares American poet William Carlos Williams’s profession, Kidd declines whimsy. Where he is playful and folksy, she is clinical and precise. She will even end-stop phrases, to close them off, to separate and isolate them so that we pay attention to exactly what her voice says or reports. Period.
There is power in the procedure though: “The animal stretch of / bread in the hands. A / cut of lamb conjuring / the slaughter.”
A description of “Harbour Mille” runs: “Later: a fire, a city of gulls / and beach wood, bare as bones. / Me … / and two men harrumphed beside me / on their four-stroke steeds.”
While the clipped phrases of a reporter, a doctor, a scientist, or a film editor convey the terrific lucidity of crisp observation, the poem jumps to vivid life with that great, colloquial verb, “harrumphed,” and the vernacular opening: “This was the last place God made / and then the devil claimed it.”
A fine poem that nicely integrates enjambment and end-stopped lines is “Come to Grief”:
“He wasn’t the first and he wasn’t the last man / lost to the water, a foot in the line, a hand / slammed fast against the gunwhale—too late…. // All day, talk on the radio of boats circling like hounds…. // Find the lumber. Measure it twice. / Nail him in. Comfort his wife. / Bury him down on the rocky shore. / He can never be lost no more.”
There’s a nice modulation of effects—a folksy voice, clear description, original imagery, and, in the last stanza, the rhyme and almost rhyme of folk song.
Another poem that rings such changes effectively is “A Large Steak,” written in the voice of Amelia Earhart (1897-ca.1937), the famed American aviatrix who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937, but who also spent two weeks in Newfoundland in 1928.
“Night, and the air smells of salt. The men asleep upstairs, / their bellies full of unending mutton. Oh, the mutton / I fear I shall begin to sprout hooves…. / Who could turn stone into such plenty?”
There’s also this smart image: “My breath (materializes) in the fog as if I were / Shackleton marching slowly to his grave.”
Gaspereau Press is famed, in part, for its book design, and the 17th-century sketches of the human skeleton, chosen for the cover and title page, suit well Handfuls of Bone. Kidd often sounds a memento-mori note, a subtle counterpoint to the siren song of the flesh.
Anna Quon’s Mental Illness Poems is self-published, just last year, likely in her native Dartmouth, NS. It’s only twelve pages—bearing twelve poems—and printed on 8½” x 11” paper (consisting of three pages, each folded length-wise once). The dark blue cardstock cover bears Joe Rosenblatt-drawings that are likely Quon’s own.
Quon has always been a poet meriting close attention, and in 2010, she was nominated for an Atlantic Book Award. Mental Illness Poems, which may be confessional of sorts, offers strong images that seem folksy, but turn startling:
“Sometimes when the pictures are crooked / and the pens run out and the cookies burn / on the bottom, that’s when sadness / hugs you awkwardly / and sits on the edge of the bed, / with you / stroking your hair / with blue hands.”
Craziness is “the horror of roses, collapsing / under the weight of their own beauty/ petals falling out like hair.”
Her angst is accessible; Quon paints pain: “Darkness covers me with its claws / And sucks the breath from me / Like a cigarette. // What’s left is dense / As a neutron star, / Unwieldy as sorrow.”
Quon is one of Canada’s most original poets. Look up her work, please. Read her. Honour her.
