The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl
by Sue Goyette
Montreal, QC: Guernica, 2015
$20. pp. 61
Forecast
by Clara Blackwood
Montreal, QC: Guernica,
$20, pp. 108
Sue Goyette’s The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl reads superficially like nonsense verse, as if The Owl and the Pussycat had fucked with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. But Goyette’s fifth volume of verse is actually based on a true and sad story: In 2006, a 4-year-old Massachusetts girl died from prolonged exposure to a cocktail of prescribed, psychiatric drugs, intended to treat her bipolar condition and ADHT. In the end, her parents were convicted of her murder.
Goyette takes this story and reimagines it as Alice-in-Oz-land so to speak, so the girl is a ghost; Poverty is a bully; and a bear symbolizes love. Goyette’s language slides or glides toward surrealism, the fantastic. “The girl refused to be afraid when she climbed / on high things. Her mother shaved the legs of the furniture / and, along with some cough syrup, stewed it / with a few of the girl’s father’s beer caps.” If this imagery seems unreal, it is supposed to be so. Horror comes sugar-coated, or accompanied with Teddy bears, reminding one of the piles of dolls left behind at Auschwitz by child Holocaust victims. We get a child’s eye view of disasters as they are narrated and investigated.
“The doctor made herself comfortable and hung her diplomas / in the witness stand. An hour to someone with your disorder, / she explained, requires a backhoe and an apology.” The hardship of the back story is softened by Goyette’s playfulness: “The girl’s father cocked / his gun and aimed at the ceiling, firing at the tin cans / that were guarding against winter, firing off on the pets / he had never been allowed. He heard a young girl / squeal every time his gun went off. You like that? he asked her.”
To critique the style of this poetry, one could say that the original tragedy is mitigated by the recourse to the bizarre nature of a picture book story. However, Goyette’s narrative verve carries one along, suspending disbelief, but never sorrow for the events unfolded. “The jury had heard how the girl’s father rasped his stubble / on the silk of the illegal drugs he’d been taking. The mother had spread silence like lard the night before the girl had died.”
Clara Blackwood’s second book of poetry is Forecast. Her work dovetails nicely with that of Goyette’s, for where the latter is concerned with revisiting childhood perceptions, Blackwood looks at ‘reality’ with the eyes of a mystic. She is unambiguously committed to the idea that there are realms beyond what is obvious and physical.
Blackwood references—reverences—other mystical poets, such as Margaret Avison and Gwendolyn MacEwen. But I can’t help but think of Stephanie Bolster’s sensibility being present here too, mainly because Blackwood is so effortlessly clear: “I believe a strange force-field surrounds / the high-rise I live in. / This would explain the insanity, the jumpers, baby-danglers, / elevators opening between floors, /and my perilous love life.”
There’s a disarming simplicity and directness in Blackwood. If you think yourself skeptical regarding mysticism, Blackwood gives you no chance to insist upon ‘reason’: “I am not sure why you called me spooky. / Far more inexplicable things / were happening that evening– / the candle extinguishing itself, / the scent of anise infusing the room / from nowhere.” The poet is witty too. When volcanic ash forces delays in European flights, her personal destiny is forecast by pop songs: “Ten minutes before departure / Queen’s ‘A Kind of Magic’ plays… / and I think Yes, this is a kind of magic / that I’m here on this cushy, blue seat / not exiled to a sleeping mat, / calling loved ones in a panic.” Read Blackwood and believe.
The Thunderbird Poems
by Armand Garnett Ruffo
Madeira Park, BC: Harbour, 2015
$19, pp. 108
Armand Garnet Ruffo, an Aboriginal Canadian poet, anthologist, essayist, and filmmaker, limns the life and art of Norval Morrisseau (1932-2007), the alcohol-bedevilled, Ojibway genius, in The Thunderbird Poems (Harbour, $19).
Thanks to his 2014 biography, Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird, Ruffo knows intimately the aesthetics and spirits and demons of the artist—whose canvasses sit at the summit of Canadian painting. The Thunderbird Poems are thus a masterful exercise in lyrical empathy.
Ruffo sees himself as part of an insurgent second-generation of First Nations intellectuals who are rearticulating the internal integrity of Aboriginal cosmologies, even in their spirited competition with historically oppressive Christianity and Occidental philosophy. Ruffo’s previous bio-in-poetry studied Grey Owl (1888-1938)—the Englishman who assumed an Ojibway identity, so the poet is well-prepared for relating the complicated mixture of Catholicism, astral-spirit-travel (Eckancar) mysticism, and Ojibway Faith that animates Morrisseau’s vibrant and intensely vivid art.
Imagine earth, water, air, and fire—and symbolic Nature spirits—accorded Day-Glo, radiant brilliance. In his intro, Ruffo says he strove “to let the paintings determine the content of the poetry”; so, rather than write only “ekphrastic” lyrics (poems about paintings), Ruffo presents the experiences that compel Morrisseau’s works.
The poems are framed—as it were—twice: Ruffo sets an italicized paragraph of factoids and occasional quotations atop each lyric; next, the title of each poem refers to an actual Morrisseau painting. Each painting-titled poem partly describes the pertinent, Morrisseau work, but also reflects on his psychology, spirituality, and life events. We end up with portraits of portraits that are also self-portraits of a man who believed he had been Bear-Spirit-touched, but was also a Thunderbird-Spirit shaman.
Ruffo employs a flexible, talkin’ free-verse lyric, at times utilizing blocks of prose. He follows the long-poem styles of Mike Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) or Peggy Atwood’s collage of art and word, The Journals of Susannah Moodie (1970). However, while Ondaatje’s Billy is a double for Ondaatje, and Atwood eyes her Susannah as a crazed interloper in the Canuck wilderness, Ruffo regards Morrisseau with non-judgmental acceptance—I mean, with something like fraternal—Native—affection. The result is memorable, visionary, visceral, original, and productive of great life-writing.
In “Death the Devourer of Human Flesh, c. 1964,” Ruffo sees Death’s “ready teeth” and “dripping tongue,” produced by “Lines of primordial power radiating like hunger.” He instructs us: “Look inside / the white chamber / of its stomach. // It’s coming and there is nothing you can do about it.” I think the poem would end most powerfully here, rather than with the final stanza that dissipates the menace portrayed so indelibly earlier.
If I must question an element in Ruffo’s approach, it would be this occasional tendency to overwrite—or to repeat bio elements in the initial notes. But I quibble: These Thunderbird poems shake with thunder and shimmer with light. See “White Man’s Curse, 1969”: “Pockmarked bodies. / A pattern of dots for disease. Plague. / One brown hand leading the other. / Green for brain. Red for art….” The cultural genocide of the Residential School system is mirrored in this symbolic line of type: “††††††††††††††††††††.”
Not only is the crucifix reduced to grave marker here, one also reads, “The feel of groping flesh still suffocates him.” Morrisseau was sexually victimized as a boy, and was alleged to have abused one of his own sons similarly. He did drugs, drank too much, and was charged with abandoning his children. How many of his ills stem from the residential-school concentration camps? “Windigo, 1979” is one of the strongest poems in this superb work: “White-haired giant stuffing his sharp mouth, his greedy guts / an oily ocean…. // Read all about it: white-collar thieves turned into porn stars. // Sometimes he sits on a bench with an empty bottle of fuel / and weeps into his hands….” This review is too short to do Ruffo justice. I can only say, “Bravo!”
Collected Poems
by Len Gasparini
Montreal, QC: Guernica, 2015
$25, pp. 304
British poet Basil Bunting’s arch quip, “A man who collects his poems screws together the boards of his coffin,” introduces rightly Len Gasparini’s Collected Poems (Guernica, $25), for Gasparini views his book as “an open coffin.”
A Collected Poems is a daunting work, for it is the poet taking a long view of his work and trying to position its best showing in the even longer view of posterity. The Italian-Canadian, Windsor, Ontario-raised, working-class, Bohemian, intellectual Gasparini is a striking poet to read in this regard—across the theatrically funeral gathering of a Collected—because his work studiously avoids any pretentiousness or Ivory Tower (poison) ivy.
If these verses are his bones—entombed metaphorically here—they are dancing. Indeed, Gasparini is rock’n’roll’s offspring: “I had … an exciting adolescence. My teachers were Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Jack Kerouac.” It’s easy to read these epigrams (generally short poems treating poignantly or wittily a theme) as lost liner notes to a classic Dylan album or as spontaneous footnotes to Kerouac’s On the Road. “One hand on the wheel / of a ’57 Chevy ragtop / custom-painted a metallic blue / so deep and liquid, / it looked like you could sink your arm into it / straight to the elbow….”
Gasparini is up-front accessible, unabashedly nostalgic: “The teen queens of my adolescence [I’d prefer “teens”]— / where are they now? Carol, Joyce, Jeanne…. // We’re dancing to ‘Drip Drop,’ by the Drifters. / A boogie-and-shuffle rhythm / magnetizes us to each other…. // Who are they now? Wives, divorcees, widows, / mothers, grandmothers….”
“When the fifties ended there was nothing but / leftover life to live.” Yes, but, there was Gasparini, continuing to hone his art, to conjoin the familial heritage of Dante with Ginsberg’s “hydrogen jukebox”; but also to merge the techniques of Imagism with comments on workaday—even grungy—life. So, “Gus the Greek is a short-order cook,” Toronto, circa 1964, who “wears out // the night prowling the taverns in search / of women as lonely as he.” Niagara Falls is “Hearts. Hymens. A crapshoot.” In a hospital, “The erect stems / of hygienically arranged flowers / soon droop; / the leaves drip / intravenously; and the petals, / like tinctured swabs, / drop.”
Such verses compare well to the street-life sagas of Charles Bukowski or with the scrupulous, social satire of F.R. Scott. Irving Layton shows up in one poem, and his womanizing, no-claptrap brio informs Gasparini’s own style. But the poet doesn’t only ink epigrams; he also grants us superb poem-studies (akin to a fine cartoonist suddenly offering a capacious, breathtaking, landscape painting). See “Elegy,” which is a showstopper poem, based on a news report about a woman who climbed into a Port Hope, Ontario, tree, in September 1975, died, and went undiscovered until the leaves fell, exposing her decomposed body.
“During the long Ontario autumn nights / she shrank into herself— / a stiff, dry branch /
stuck in the wind’s throat…. / the skeletal tree became her catafalque / in which she sat fully-clothed— / a scarecrow uprooted….” A plainly worded lyric, “After the Divorce,” describes that alienating status: “You pop a Valium / and feel its white fuzz / floating your nerves / like tiny parachutes.” “Orchard” presents “Row after row after row” of “applesapplesapples,” and then “a girl’s bare legs / peep through the foliage.”
“Knistersque” is not only Gasparini’s homage to the neglected, Canadian imagist, Raymond Knister, but is proof of his delight in sharp-eyed depictions, even if sordid or tawdry, as in “Image, Afterimage”: “a seagull casts its gleam / on a girl in a white bikini / sunbathing on the beach.” True to his laconic taste, Gasparini pens good one-liners: “Toronto—home of the homesick”; “What is memory but an emotion / On vacation”; “Beware of adjectives; they bleed nouns”….
This Collected Poems is a properly hefty 300 pages, covering 16 collections and including more than 200 poems. It is an excellent read, and convicted in its themes—sex, cities, song, plus liquor, ‘ligion, and livin’. But the poems that are consistently strongest are, arguably—mysteriously—those that brood on Nature. Gasparini is the hipster as naturalist….
