Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems
by Carole Glasser Langille
Toronto, ON: Pedlar, 2012
112 pp. $20
Sit You Waiting
by Kim Clark
Halfmoon, BC: Caitlin, 2012
112 pp. $17
Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems is Carole Glasser Langille’s fourth poetry book. Twice a poetry-award nominee, the Dalhousie University Creative Writing teacher, in this new book, invests Shakespeare’s Ophelia with an inner life. In Hamlet, Ophelia is the lovelorn, would-be lover of the sable-clad prince. Addled by Hamlet’s murder of her Machiavellian dad, the gal, suicidal, drowns.
Langille undertakes the Atwoodian mission to recover Ophelia’s thoughts and impulses, to see the character as less a victim and more a scapegoat, and then to view her as a cultural icon of endless resonance. In short, Ophelia becomes a martyr-saint in Langille’s literary take on the real-life Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc., founded by a Manhattan, performance artist. Langille engages with Hamlet, but also with the post-mortem “life” of Ophelia as post-modern symbol.
Langille sees Ophelia as morbid, but meditative: “I traded / the North Star for a sinking bough. To have charity always / in our mouths, isn’t that the virtue?” Ophelia perishes in a wilderness less Danish than Nova Scotian: “The cut throat of dusk leaked milky light / then darkened until the whole winter sky with its / hunters and beasts, its lit dippers, somersaulted / below the water’s surface, rippling.”
Sensual and rightly sexist is the imagery of drowning: “A dead man’s hand, the ice pick of water, / pried open my mouth.” Perilous fluidity even shows up in the numerical titles demarcating each section of the collection: They are printed to resemble waterlogged, floating, theatre tickets. Watery imagery is all: “dreams get washed away / like soil when nothing is left / to hold them in place”; “Dreams move the sea… I reached out as if I could grasp that man…, // wall of water that he was.”
A fine conceit: Hamlet—both prince and play—is a tsunami that ravishes Ophelia, bereaving her, and then leaving her tear-sodden and submerged in elegy… Abandoning the play behind and considering Ophelia as symbol, Langille wonders, “Was Ophelia Jewish? She read what she saw / backward, from right to left, like Hebrew….” Interviewed by Carl Jung, Ophelia answers his word “Silence” with the statement, “What quenched my thirst.” In “Ophelia.com,” our lady of sorrows comments, “Dying as I am continually, / everyone has use for me. The drive’s hard. / Once barely perceptible, / now I’m perpetual.”
Autobiography is hinted at too, in the poem, “Girls Who Lived in New York in the Sixties,” a mash up of the TV shows Mad Men and Sex in the City. True: some poems could use further trimming, to accent the strongest insights and images. Yet, this book is a superb outing. Plunge right in.
Kim Clark’s Sit You Waiting is a side effect, of sorts, of multiple sclerosis. Though the disease hinders some brain functions, it has freed Clark’s poetical self. The result is art; it’s “sit-u-ational,” one might say. But these are sharp, unsentimental lyrics: Vers libre with guts and gusto: “My body held poetry for ransom, / threatened sinistrally— / first with a little finger / [accidental pizzicato], next my left foot. / The price was high, mind had to pay up / to make room for the lyric line.” Clark makes frequent use of square brackets, to provide for fuller—or alternative—readings of a line, an image. It can feel overdone: “Sleep [stealthy] leaves / the makeshift bed, the woman / [a subduction].” But the device is immediately distinctive—much like bill bissett’s ee-cumming’s style grammar and spelling. And it is—usually—effective: “a wetness sharp enough / to cut the ashen sorrow / cleansing the palate / of mere [black/white] words.”
The B.C. poet also writes straightforward lyrics, even poignant, haiku-like moments: “the trouble with tender / is the small word contained there / enveloped in empty letters.” Clark’s centrepiece is an impressionistic sequence about a train trip across outback Australia: “the light through the blinds / can only be / the sound of snow.” The pieces are are either lyric or proem: “An intrusion of cockroaches escapes from a crusted / papier-mâché ball, dead centre, first one, then an endless scurry.” Clark shows debts to bp Nichol and P.K. Page. But she repays their influence by writing so powerfully and beautifully—in her own right.
