Peeling Rambutan
by Gillian Sze
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press
$20
Simple Simony
by Jono Borden
$20
Disclosure: I’ve published several titles with Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press. Yet, I remain objective in my critiques.
An acclaimed small press, Gaspereau is becoming more “diverse,” expanding beyond the eco-poetry it has long championed.
This season’s poetry titles include, thus, debut works by African-Nova Scotian Sylvia Hamilton and Shalan Joudry, a Mi’kmaw.
Add now Gillian Sze, a Sino-Canadian poet outta Winnipeg, now a Montréalaise. Her third collection is Peeling Rambutan.
Mixing “proems” and free verse, Sze meditates on her Chinese heritage—familial and cultural, and orients this individualized and intellectualized sensibility to teasing out nuances in travel, migration, and belonging.
Peeling Rambutan is cast as “a poetic travelogue.” True: It conjures up Japanese poet Matsuo Basho’s 17th-century masterpiece, A Narrow Road to the Deep North. For Sze, the travel is also psychological, and so her book may echo Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida (2004).
A prize-winning poet, Sze displays consummate artistry. She traces Aristotle’s teaching: The job of the poet is to make metaphors.
“Nearby, a woman’s scarf billows like a shout, losing sound at the tasseled fringes”; “She’s collected scores of summer in her basket”; “A brothel of lilacs. / Four bushes of heavy-chested women…. / They jostle you between them, / their perfume solid as solder.”
Sze has fun with puns: “There are nights when the tomatoes growing below my window / freeze to death and no morning is enough to save them.”
Often prose poems degenerate into preciosity. Sze tries to hone her prose, to highlight radiant thought: “The light would fall to her hands like a slippery newborn”; “Sentences sit unused and, like forgotten fruit in a bowl, they catch light and shrivel…. Mostly we learn to keep our brilliant rot to ourselves.”
Sze’s inventive images recall Anne Carson’s style, right down to the classical Greek fetish. Her prose mirrors Michael Ondaatje’s penchant for the eccentric: To locate the “foreign” in the local and the “stranger” in the comrade.
Yet, her prose can decay into tourism. The lyric poems, often employing Chinese epigrams or folklore, are strongest: “At dusk, the shadows fall east. / They break over the disjointed fence / and tumble to the other side.”
Succulent in its excellence, Sze’s poetry insists that cultural “difference” is what can make a beautiful difference in our apprehension of the “beautiful”: “The Chinese verb used to describe / ‘becoming / a Buddha’ // is the same verb used / to describe ‘the producing of sweat’ // the same verb used / to describe ‘the publishing of a book.’”
Halifax’s Jono Borden is a defiant, do-it-yourselfer poet, whose graphic Muse is a deliberate throwback to 70s Punk and 80s New Wave.
His debut book, Simple Simony, proudly self-published, is a stark contrast to Sze, eschewing mainstream poetic beauty, to come up raucous. So, Borden invokes Lord—incestuous and insurrectionist—Byron as well as the “prophetic” Blake and the ironic Laforgue: “Pillage and decipher (this memoir)—‘my Life’—if you dare think you can bare it….”
That pun—“bare”/”bear”—speaks volumes about this book. Borden wants to shake us, to slap us cross the face (metaphorically), to arouse us from our drowsy browsing of comfy Canuck verse.
He wants to start a ruckus, bring the noise: “Catastrophe catasterised me. / Now, I’m a big black ‘kunstellation’ / Up here, hanging like f(r)amed misery / Glowing, toeing strife and elation.”
His quatrains and triplets fuse apocalyptic, scatological, Dark Romantic lingo via an intellect both encyclopedic and irreverent: “How do I pen my Heart? / I’d open him if the shovel / Didn’t heap him with dark.”
His chutzpah is bracing, brazen. He dast imagine himself supreme, that his “Art” is “Going where the great went.”
If Borden is unclear, so what? It’s the same obscurity that one finds in Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, and the words of other great, Rock songsmiths: “She went to Los Angeles and got lost / Among the angels; along the way, tossed, / And, in the end, well, she recouped the cost.”
Admirable is (t)his (s)pouting! Dude’s got guts—big lungs—(sh)outing Truth!
