when this world comes to an end
By Kate Cayley
London, ON: Brick, 2013
88 pp. $20
Notebook M
By Gillian Savigny
Toronto, ON: Insomniac, 2012
112 pp. $17
In her first book, when this world comes to an end, Kate Cayley employs the free-verse, bio-narrative, in which the speaker—the poet or the subject—meditates on his or her life lived.
The personages are famous (Simone Weil, etc.) or infamous (Charles Dodgson-as-pedophile, etc.). Thus, Cayley reminds one of Michael Ondaatje’s cinematic verse-studies of artists and criminals. But her approach also recalls Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) and the “dramatic monologues” authored by Victorian poet Robert Browning.
Cayley gives us the confession of axe-murderer William Kemmler, the first person to die in the electric chair (1893). She pens adroitly his cold-blooded recollection of his crime: “I was not a good husband. / Whiskey lay like (urine) in dozens of glasses”; “The first blow / I thought she’d fall apart easily as / a jug breaking, streaming water”; “Seventeen cuts, her skull sharded, a map / of red drops on the wall.”
Cayley depicts Judas Iscariot as a retiree in cottage country: “he is unremarkable, pleasant. / Good at parties… , / knows a thing or two about wine… . / It was only / the other apostles who wished he’d hanged himself / in that ravening field planted with silver pieces, the rope / pulling his face purple… .”
A Toronto theatre artistic director, Cayley follows the example of British writers W.H. Auden and Angela Carter in updating historical speakers to give them a jarring, new context and diction. Perhaps she also follows Canadian poet Richard Outram (1930-2005), who was also a theatre tradesman.
Cayley also inks poems based on photographs and prose poems that are newfangled fairy tales (in the patented style of Canadian poet Stephanie Bolster). These pieces seem less focused, less intense.
But one glimpses powerful images, here and there, as in these lines from “Silver Cross Mother, 1919,” a photo-lyric: “A tight hermetic grief / too close for sunlight to slide through … , / a quiet seepage, / as if under her dress / her breasts leaked blood.”
Gillian Savigny’s first book of poems, Notebook M, takes up Cayley’s interest in reanimating a historical personage, in this case Charles Darwin (1809-82).
The collection is ambitious, with Savigny mining verse from the great British naturalist’s philosophical Notebook M, in which Darwin muses about “Metaphysics on Morals & Speculations on Expression.”
Savigny experiments here. She reprints actual pages of Darwin’s work in faded print, but then isolates—in bold print—words or word-parts, to create new-“found” lyrics out of Darwin’s prose.
So, Darwin’s sentence, “Such is the history of the changes in which the present condition of Patagonia has, I believe, been determined,” yields—in bold print—Savigny’s line, “THE HISTORY OF CHANGES.”
This revisioning technique leads to surrealism. So, a page of Darwin yields this Savigny “lyric”: “Port Famine … the name expresses the lingering and extreme suffering of a people / who were led captive many years / in / the stomachs of / scorpions.”
Savigny “edits” Darwin, to emphasize the poetry lurking within his prose.
(One can have some fun in considering “poetic” Darwin phrases that Savigny hasn’t highlighted or selected: “sterile countries”; “the neighing of the guanaco”; “an ass mounted on taller legs and with a long neck”; “We undermined the grave on both sides but could not find any relics, or even bones,” etc.)
When Savigny writes in her own voice, yet echoes Darwin, the results are fine: “Off the coast of Patagonia, the ship sailed into a storm / of butterflies so thick the sky was lost behind them… . / In the sea off Cape Corrientes, he hadn’t been looking / for insects but found them in the thousands, / and spiders descending with silk parachutes / from some mysterious source.”
This passage compares well with Darwin’s own words about butterfly “flocks” and his memory of sailors crying, “it was snowing butterflies.”
A born Vancouverite who has worked all about Canada, Savigny now lives in Toronto. While Notebook M records her obsession with Darwin, one notes that when she is free of his spell, and is, in fact, her own woman, she writes her most compelling verse, as in “The Dictionary.” To be read.
between dusk and night
By Emily McGiffin
London, ON: Brick, 2012
$19
Rosa Rose
By Robert Priest
Hamilton, ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2013
50 pp. $10
In her debut collection, between dusk and night, Emily McGiffin, who lives in northwestern BC, turns a watchful eye to Nature and our relationship to it which is, well, to terrorize it.
(McGiffin’s book cover photo is evocative in this regard: There is sunset over the central peak of a mountain that is girded by smaller peaks, with the result that the sun looks like a candle flame about to be extinguished as it drowns in its cratered wax.)
But McGiffin is a poet, and she chooses to showcase the miracle of creation. Thus, a fast car drive turns into a confrontation with “the sudden / ramparts of the mountain landscape… . / ‘Vast’? Inadequate. It thumps the wind out. The heart /flutteringly aware of how paltry it is.”
A heart “fluttering” may not be news, but the idea of a mountain, “thumping” the wind, well, that is poetry.
McGiffin has an eye for subtle images that are exact and right: “Sun the marrow of a bone-white sky.” But she also has an ear for verbs and everyday, provincial speech: “Up at six and out, bumping up the mountain road / for the split, toss, stack [of firewood].”
Her verses recall Isabella Valancy Crawford’s picturesque and rollicking narratives, but also the philosophical touches of Jan Zwicky, Mahatma Gandhi, and Antonie de Saint-Exupery.
One example of her domestic style is McGiffin’s “The Afternoon of Your Parting”: “halving our way through the last bite of some excessive / chocolate dessert, I read you a piece about glass-blowers, // how their art is a variant of absence: / coloured spheres a tempered striving / to catch breath’s flight, sunlight falling through. // An extension I guess of our human physiology: / the heart healing around an emptiness / into some tougher, brighter thing.”
McGiffin is a good poet, but she could push herself further, to compose more lines that startle the heart with their sudden fierce perception: “you stood amid aspens barked up and blackened by frost. Lucid / the trees were articulate with wind / and the ramshackle sunlight—how they leaned into it, greening!— / though the moose laid their thick teeth into that spring flourish, / into that bitter sap, that throb of… of? desire? fortitude? old habit?”
Nice it is when the answers ain’t immediate. When mystery transfigures the poet.
British-born, Toronto-born singer-songwriter and poet Robert Priest has been fusing music and message for young and old, for entertainment and enlightenment, for 25 years. Most famously, his 1992 lyric, “Song Instead of a Kiss,” scored Canadian rock-legend Alannah Myles a Grammy nomination.
But Priest is a poet-troubadour in the 1960s mode of Bob Dylan: To illuminate injustice and to celebrate struggle against it.
This premise lies behind his latest children’s-oriented book of verse, Rosa Rose, wherein Priest presents a gallery of heroes, those who suffered to achieve real liberation for the poor and oppressed, or simply to make life better for others.
So “Rosa Sat” is for seamstress Rosa Parks who sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the greater Civil Rights Movement in 1955, by refusing to surrender her seat on the bus to “a white man (who) stood in the aisle.” The point is made in child-friendly rhyme: “Rosa rose, and the people rose / She went to court and she won. / Rosa rose and the people rose / And they’d only just begun.”
Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope is remembered poignantly: “Terry ran, Terry ran, / he strode from hip to heel. / One leg was muscle, bone, and skin. / One fibreglass and steel.”
Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 campaign for free salt for Indians and an end to British imperialism is given a spicy spin: “He was a very gentle man, / A slow and steady stepper. / For salt he brought the empire down— / What if he’d wanted pepper?”
The Greek poet Sappho, a woman whose lays about love of women was lost “and remained that way / Almost a thousand years” is recovered triumphantly: “Lovers have saved her—the poet of love / She was lost beyond recall. / Sappho of Lesbos, we love your lines! / One day we’ll have them all.
Maybe the showstopper treats Muhammad Ali: Our children do need to know that the greatest boxer “of all time” was also anti-imperialist—and, thus, an inspiration to millions.
Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films
by James Chapman
New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2008
336 pp. $21
I like movies—blockbusters and intense, quiet flicks too. So, let’s consider Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. First published in 1999, it was revised in 2007 so that author James Chapman could respond to Casino Royale (2006). A film prof at the University of Leicester, Chapman has been in “Bondage” since seeing his first Bond flick, at age 8, in 1977, namely, The Spy Who Loved Me, which he deems “massive and sumptuous.”
Chapman is a Bond buff, a film fan, and a serious scholar, and he wears all three hats, as it were, in assessing the screen adaptations (24 up to 2006) of Ian Fleming’s fictional spy, emphasizing directors’ styles, actors’ interpretations, plot plausibility, and geopolitical tie-ins, as well as box-office success and critics’ views.
Chapman places each release in a cultural context of international events and Anglo-American relations. He quotes journalists and scholars, but never neglects fans: His writing balances the visceral responses of audiences and the “objective” opinions of others.
Chapman offers new ideas, such as explaining that Sean Connery’s popular incarnation of Bond introduced “a new style of performance: A British screen hero in the manner of an American leading man.”
But there are errors: Chapman situates Manuel Noriega, once dictator of Panama, in “Nicaragua” (p. 206); he omits a certain Mr. Black as one of the “media tycoons” caricatured—albeit obliquely—in Tomorrow Never Dies (p. 226).
Also, Chapman seems to miss “the big picture” (pun intended). Maybe the reason for the fun of Bond films is that they present an epic sense of adventure, featuring shocks and sex, which, while formulaic, varies enough each time so that each picture seems superbly sensational in its own right.
