Writings / Reviews: George Elliott Clarke

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Poetry, Biography, Public Discourse and Fiction Reviews

 

Distillo
by Basma Kavanagh
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2012
96 pp., $20

Deepwater Vee
by Melanie Siebert
Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2010
96 pp., $19

 

Distillo is Basma Kavanagh’s debut poetry collection; Deepwater Vee launches Melanie Siebert’s career in poetry. Kavanagh now lives in Kentville, NS, while Siebert has lived recently in Victoria, BC. Both poets are interested in weather, rivers, latitude, longitude, forests, flora, and fauna.

Kavanagh opens her collection with a catalogue of different types of rainfalls, and the subject is suitable to her style, which emphasizes vivid verbs: Her descriptions spring forth or rain down the page, so to speak. “Imbris Delapidato” describes rain that’s “not a true rain,” but rather, “a dense shower accompanied by strong, gusting winds.” The poet then gives her definition: “Cold winds fling this rain in brittle handfuls / against the house, fling it stinging against / skin. Gravelly bursts invert umbrellas, / … zing / pepper the face….” “Pluvia Pertendo” is, as it turns out, “a true rain, light but steady…” Kavanagh also terms this rain “breathy chatter” that, in the backyard, “invites a rush of feather-fluffing among / the kinglets and the sparrows tucked / into spruces half-hiding from the water….” Here her observational detail supplements her verb-based insight.

There is something Hopkins-esque in such writing, or, closer to home, one could say that Margaret Avison’s—or Peter Sanger’s—spiky verbs and Nature-watching lyrics are in evidence. But there are also concrete poems—in the shapes of fish—that seem to follow Dylan Thomas, though without his wasteful—if sonorous—surrealism. While Kavanagh’s debut is assured and remarkable, the naturalist impulse is a tad déjà vu. Nature is the perennial prime subject of our English-Canadian poetry, and so it must be tackled from fresh tangents if it is to make for compelling reading.

The simple poem, “Rice Root,” does seem to break from the mould of wilderness observation, principally by assuming the form of a shaman’s chant: “Skunk lily / rotting-meat lily, / Purple-bronze fritillary / keep-it-living lily, / Rice-root fritillary, / feeds-the-people lily. / Black sarana lily, / cooked-with-oil lily, / Xukwem lily; / scatter-the-grains lily / for / next year’s lily.” Another strong poem is “Bear,” which seems to describe the animal, but then begins to comment on what is bearable—or not: “Endure the nasty fug / of something lumbering around / while half-pretending it isn’t there.” Occasionally, what could be a “wet carpet … inflates / into hundreds of pounds of muscle / and fat with a fierce face.”

Kavanagh finds her most original strength when she is not only describing an element of nature, but is also thinking about the deeper meaning of that phenomenon, discovering its magic or its strangeness vis-à-vis human experience. See her “Hush”: “A thrush swims its voice down / through air, casts a weightless / net of notes to float at dusk.” It is lovely; yet, one wonders what this moment means for the speaker. Aside from quibbles, Kavanagh is off to a strong start.

And the same can be said for Siebert. She has explored rivers and struck camp in various quarters of the original North West Territories (which included Alberta and Saskatchewan) and she studied creative writing in Victoria, BC. Her poetry is, as with Kavanagh’s work, rooted in nature observation, but she is less disciplined—wilder—with leaps and curves and switchbacks, with her ideas and memories moving about as unpredictably as a flooding river: “River of mixed tongues and guns traded west, frayed edge of the muscle-old herds chewing the hills, fringe between grassland and aspen parkland. The river opaque in all seasons, cartilage, cash flow.” “Flow” is really the style of these lyrics; they run; they jig: “North Sask wobbles into the underbrush voicebox. / Acid rain trucks in from the tar sands. / Two weeks ago stormwater / overflowed sewage into the river.” The power of such writing is that one seems to experience the observations simultaneously with the speaker. But the rush of images is not always clear: Does a river wobble—or warble—into a voicebox? Is it easy to visualize acid rain arriving in trucks? Is the description of the stormwater and the sewage ineffectively prosaic? Etc.

 

Post-Apothecary
by Sandra Ridley
St. Johns, NL: Pedlar, 2011
96 pp., $20

When All My Disappointments Came At Once
by Todd Swift
Toronto, ON: Tightrope, 2012
65 pp., $17

 

Post-Apothecary is Sandra Ridley’s second book of poetry; When All My Disappointments Came At Once is Todd Swift’s eighth verse collection. Ridley witnesses medical violence; Swift muses on infertility. Both poets meditate on doctoring—or therapy—and its limits.

Ridley applies the “innovative” poetics of disjuncture—wrenched syntax, agrammatical statement, and a teasing refusal of lyrical utterance. One is invited to experience confusion and alienation; to feel the weird turmoil of the heroine; one is asked to enter into her suffering, her trauma. The result is postmodern, feminist Gothic. The victim is first viewed as “a note hung over a bed, a metal trolley, & swinging doors,” as “Reeled. / Rocked. A wet tangle of hair,” as “making it all up. / Can’t possibly see through a retinal slit, out the dilated corner of.” The image recalls slasher films such as Psycho (1960) or Halloween II (1981) or I Spit On Your Grave (1978). But it also looks back to classic victims of male repression, such as Hamlet’s Ophelia, but also to the female author of one of the great horror stories, namely Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein (1818).

Then again, this narrative lyric suite is inspired in part by the author’s tour of the Saskatchewan Hospital, a psychiatric institution. (Electro-shock therapy, used a century ago, recalls Frankenstein’s monster being animated thanks to bolts of lightning sizzling through its dead flesh.) Post-Apothecary straddles, in its very title, eras and “cures”; it could be “now” or it could be “then.” One poem mentions a “switchboard”—seemingly in this century; another references a “corset”—perhaps the Victorian era. Another poem offers medieval medicine: “Black bile & melancholy before a sponge soaked with mandrake”; but the last poem insists that the patient, merely playfully named (one hopes) “Ridley,” has been given “methedrine 10 mg IV.”

The time-shifting mergers of medications (apothecaries) underlines—as do the epigraphs from five women poets—the feminist analysis at work (or play) here: Women victims of male monsters are often further abused by male medical practices, from the application of laudanum or “faith in morphine” to “halothane” (used in the deadly crimes committed by Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo in Ontario in the 1990s). This good collection of poems wonders whether there’s any real difference between a male doctor and Jack the Ripper, or between sexual “interference” and the “intervention” that is supposed to heal its harm.

Swift’s poetry is also concerned with the collision between biology and medicine, but is more diffused and more poignant than is necessarily the case for Ridley, for he isn’t writing a story, but, in a sense, a memoir: These poems treat his and his wife’s psychological responses to the news that he is infertile, that, together, for all their love, they cannot have a child. That fact explains the elegiac tone of the book as well as the piercing quality of individual poems. However, never mind the incitements of the verse; the collection is excitingly excellent.

See the opening stanzas of “Seven Good Fridays”: “April takes vinegar once a year— / Easter I turned forty, gave up youth / And reckless afternoons endowed with darkness // Being twenty is like being a millionaire…. // I should have come into the world in summer // Not shadowing the saviour like a blinking twin / Upstaging his broken promise on the skull / With a spring birth, small, infertile.” Born and raised in Montreal, but now teaching creative writing at Kingston University, at London, UK, Swift is steeped in the Anglo-American intellectual tradition of T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Yet, he is accessible, succinct, and clear. In one poem, the speaker and his wife build a snowman—or, for them, a “child,” enjoying the experience of being parents of a sort. But, by morning, it is “trampled down— / Particles, bits and chunks, a rumour / Of what it has been to us: a snow-child / Killed by real kids, cruel to snow as rain.” Here is grief-tinged beauty: “Stay, lie with me when I die / and keep me now I am dead…. // Fold your arms around what stays / when older forms of love have fled.”

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