Poetry, Fiction, Historical Crime, Comics and Scholarly Reviews
Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects
by Catherine Graham and Richard Greene
Hamilton, ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2013
$17
The surnames of poets Catherine Graham and Richard Greene align to produce the name of the British author of “entertainments,” namely Graham Greene, an author of interest to Newfoundland-born poet Rick Greene. But I start with Graham, whose inspirations are Irish poet Dorothy Molloy as well as Canada’s own P.K. Page.
Graham’s fifth poetry collection, Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects, began as a deliberate experiment that turned Gothic and magical. First writing “glosas,” a poetry form that borrows the first four lines of another poet’s work to serve as the last line of each of four new, ten-line stanzas, Graham broke away from this structure, to begin crafting poems, lyrical but “with a sinister edge.”
Now, save for a few poems, Graham retains in most a few lines or phrases taken—with acknowledgement—from Molloy. The result is a book showcasing macabre images. For all the debt to Molloy, there’s Poe in this poetry—and Plath. The first poem quotes no Molloy, but floats an air of dread: the shock of accidental death occasioned by innocent encounter. A “drunk father” slams his car into a “white-tailed beast,” on its own “nocturnal route,” but coming “to stand on the road for some (cursed) reason.”
The poem, “Flies Gather,” reverses itself, so that it ends, “Gather flies.” Its beginning is also its end: “There is much agony in the entrails of love.” Graham shows us despair, not paradise. We can know love only until—to quote Molloy, “the sickle moon cuts.” To “get” these poems, imagine Dr. Seuss rewriting the Marquis de Sade.
A poem of seeming whimsy—“The Queen Is Not Welcome Here”—is likely the raving of a mad person: “She won’t leave, the Queen. She is hogging / my room, my living room…. / And Bobby Orr / keeps waiting by the door, tapping his / hockey stick […]” It might seem like good fun, but we that hockey stick mimics Death’s scythe […]
Graham is a fine poet: “The way the sun peeks out from a continent / of cloud, a geyser of light that rams the sea / and breaks all meaning into knuckling diamonds […]” Does she need to chase her lines with Molloy’s line, “he gave me full instructions (re) weather”?
Is she a better poet than Molloy? Maybe. Surely, she is better off—to speak for herself.
Rick Greene’s newest book of poetry, Dante’s House (Signal, $18), gives us, consummately, his skill at measured verse, likely a result of good schooling in the old Newfoundland, religious-based system, which accented discipline and craft as being the basis for art and engineering.
Greene pens rhyme, blank verse, vers libéré, terza rima, all with the lyric ease that hides the prosaic work of diligence and mastery.
But despite the subtle honing that touches each line, the miracle of clarity and the charity of meaning, or, simply, the classicism that haunts each poem (most tenderly), Greene is very much a man of the moment, alive to our modernity, our dreams and humdrum sorrows.
Given Greene’s Newfoundland childhood, I want to align him with E.J. Pratt, the great Modernist poet of the Rock. But, really, Greene reads, in places, more like Derek Walcott, the master poet of the Caribbean, who also greets modernism with classical grace.
Dante’s House holds only a dozen poems—like Stations of the Cross or the division of the classic epic.
But the terminal and titular poem is a masterpiece. The second-last poem, “Crooked Eclipses,” yields lines that should last: “Just pain and sleep: chemo becomes morphine / and seventy years of being have been; / I substitute have seen you for will see. / Tenses shift and I prepare for memory.”
“Dante’s House” employs the eponymous poet’s transcendent rhyme scheme (also adapted by Walcott for his Omeros)—terza rima—to tell of a summer teaching-and-tourism trip to Italy and also of a mother’s passing.
The poem is rich with puns, witty rhymes, stunning images, and moving moments. It is a deft, definite achievement.
I’ll quote lines now: “I am glad of an art where nothing fits”; “remembered corpses / made a graveyard of the mind”; “I am again / made silent by a form that’s extreme // in its simplicity: A Christ … / whose four snapped off toes stand now for pain”; “The press of bodies moves us on.” Amen.
