The Scarborough
by Michael Lista
Montreal, QC: Vehicule, 2015
68 pp, $18.00
Looking East Over My Shoulder
by Jill Jorgenson
Toronto, ON: Cormorant, 2014
96 pp, $18.00
Michael Lista and Jill Jorgenson are quite different poets, but both share connections to East End Toronto: Scarborough for Lista and old East York for Jorgenson. However, Lista’s Scarborough, a childhood haunt, is full of ghosts. His second book, The Scarborough, could be Halloween reading. But the monster conjured is all too real. Lista memorializes Good Friday-to-Easter 1992—when schoolgirl Kristin French fell prey to a hubby-wife murder-duo, whose evil crimes terrorized Ontario. Indeed, the guy had been the fiend of Scarborough, assaulting dozens of women.
Lista’s strategy in his book is to ignore the killers, but to recall the civic and pop culture which served as backdrop to their cold-blooded, videotaped violence. The tone of the collection is ironic, bleak, smart, and despairing: “prayers of rescue rise to no messiah”; “The world: a hell of a place to be alive.” It’s a Diane Arbus universe: Her pics of damaged people—shabby, alone, freakish—would be ideal for this vision of “Scarberia.” Or, really, the poems could be read as “entertainment” between the acts of a George F. Walker play, which also focus on broken folks from east Toronto, on moral creeps and emotional cripples.
A poem that maps deftly this neon-lit, billboard-placarded waste land is “Fowl”: “The girl from Scarborough liked being slapped / Down the hall from where her mother slept. // A big, hard-working hand, anybody’s / To come medicinally down, antibody // To the slow infection of her Western face….” “Some birds don’t migrate. Above, two lonely fowl / Scream across the sky their only vowel.”
The deliberate monotony of the rhymes accents the depressing soullessness of this domestic, suburban oppression. Escapism offers no relief. “King Kong” presents the love-struck, cinematic ape as a tragic hero: “Black bees bang down, bang steel, and burrow him…. / Confused, setting down his unwilling bride, / Kong, on the wrong side of a killing, died.” Nor does poetry—art—salve the troubled psyche: “The old masters knew it: just crack the [poem] / With a few hard stanzas, and it’ll break / Like a compliant egg, spilling its everything. / What the poem refuses the poet takes.”
Lista is clear-eyed and sharp-eared; he can make a poem say and do whatever he likes. Yet, his study of the Bernardo-Homolka outrages of a generation ago ends in easygoing—thus displeasing—stoicism.
Jorgenson’s Looking East Over My Shoulder is like dawn breaking after the nightmarish reality that Lista describes. Assuredly, her outlook is sunny, but not Pollyanna. She finds joy in nature, neighbourhood, family, friends, her labour and her lover. While Lista enlists—rightly—infernal Dante and damned poets like Rimbaud, Jorgenson takes the spirited—and spiritual—Gerard Manley Hopkins as her model, letting alliteration letter her hearty feelings. “Leaky lychees. / Even the good ones, thin soft skulls cracked and peeled, / exposing wee firm brains translucent white, wet, are / kind of weird. Alien bird. And it appears I’m not so fond / of the watery sweetish-sour Anjou-pear-ish, / foreign strange on my Caucasian tongue, after all.”
Another connection to Hopkins—and perhaps Margaret Avison—is a strain of mysticism in Jorgenson. Her poetry emerges, not from classroom study but outdoors rambles, and the musing allowed while working as that endangered species, a letter carrier. The result is poetry that’s winsome, welcoming of everyday experience: “East’s pink casts pink on west’s vast bank of cloud / west’s vast pink cloud bank now casts back pink / on east’s west flank of house….” It’s only a sunrise; but it’s a very specific sunrise, given vivacious observation.
Elsewhere, Jorgenson notes, “It’s now officially fall. / I knew it had to happen // sometime after all. I pluck from my foot / a single stuck dewy oval leaf, / no end to this day’s / gratuitous bejewelling.” Lovely the rush of energy in these lines: “butterflies bow out / fritillarian flare of orange, a fleet, // … and here— / plea appeased, at least— // through the window / a sea of pastel petals plays, at ease, then sleeps.” Is Jorgenson too pretty here? Maybe. But it’s a first collection: More spring than fall in its feeling.
Karyotype
by Kim Trainor
London, ON: Brick, 2015
96 pp, $20.00
Kim Trainor’s debut poetry book prefers not births, but deaths—mysterious and/or violent—and the need to remember those slain (if indirectly by starvation) and/or missing.
Her collection conjoins Halloween and Remembrance Day: The recollection of the organized violence that is war and/or tyranny demands a remembering of horror, terror, courage, and grief.
The title of Trainor’s book, Karyotype (Brick, $20), refers to “the characteristic chromosome complement of a species,” and, specifically, in the titular poem, to the attempt “to extract intact DNA from … several mummies” exhumed in China, including “The Beauty of Loulan,” a 4,000-year-old female who died, aged about 40.
The titular sequence makes two recurrent points: 1) A cadaver can’t reveal the soul: “But where is she, / in the blue-stained karyogram … // this Beauty of Loulan, this beauty?”
2) Every violent death is possibly martyrdom: “a newborn found in Burns Bog. / He was wrapped in a towel at birth / and thrown away. Is there a myth // that can explain this suffering… / or is it the usual story— // just one more sacrificial victim?”
Trainor pens the struggle of poets to bear witness: Liu Baiqiang / sentenced to eighteen years for ‘Counter-Revlutionary Incitement’ / … attached words to the legs of locusts // … Long Live Freedom!… // and flung them over the walls / of his prison, into the air.”
“Field notes: Arras 1917” focuses on the treasure of a slain, Great War soldier’s notebook: “No man’s land is written over / in your cramped hand.”
Fast forward to the Spring 2003 “Coalition of the Willing” War Criminals’ Iraq Invasion: A speaker, watching TV news, sees “pale slivers of tracer fire in the desert, / missiles scattered like black seeds, / a pale red stain on the horizon that pours back into the dark.”
“Ash” recounts the 1990s Serbian torching of Bosnian libraries: “A few books … / could still be read one last time as pages floated down / black letters burning on grey. // You could … / catch them in your hand like snowflakes / and read the words as they melted to ash.”
Like John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” Trainor teaches us that Remembrance is vital.
Emily Pohl-Weary’s second verse collection, Ghost Sick (Tightrope, $20), is subtitled, “a poetry of witness.” She doesn’t chronicle foreign warfare, but rather the violence of Toronto’s unacknowledged ghettoes, Ontario’s prisons, and supposedly comfy suburbs.
Pohl-Weary’s gritty vernacular got game, got street cred: “All the pretty ghetto girls / cried and puked vodka in the gutter / while their man-boys were shot like rabid dogs….”
Like Holocaust witness poet Paul Celan, Pohl-Weary checks tabloids, billboards, newsflashes, for the language to bespeak domesticated violence: “He was twelve / she a statistic / This city explained the nonsensical by calling her a whore / As if opening her legs was enough / to justfy her murder….”
“Call Me Crab Apple Girl” is an elegiac dramatic monologue in the voice of Ashley Smith (1988-2007), who was before the courts, severally, beginning at age 13 for pelting a postie with fruit because she believed he’d stolen “my neighbour’s welfare money.” In the year of her death, a suicide now officially ruled as homicide, Smith was transferred 17 times among 11 institutions.
Pohl-Weary captures Smith’s alienation and despair brilliantly: “I fight for food, air, fight for sense, to be alone / Fight the way the guards look through me”; “I find small ways to remember I’m alive “; “Pinned / to an entomologist’s spreading board / Cocooned butterfly in wrapping / I’m no longer Ashley / I am pepper sprayed, battered….”
“Those Who Died” sums up the importance of bearing witness: “When you’ve been on the sweetest date / feel loving and open / think of those who died…. // Wounded and angry / they fought, but were killed anyhow / tossed in graves with no tombstones…. // Remember that you live where they did not. / You are the survivor and the advocate. / You must live for those who died.”
Pohl-Weary credits Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal for influencing “Those Who Died.” But its last lines also remind one of McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”: “To you from failing hands we throw / The torch. Be yours to hold it high.”
