Poetry Review

J.A. Weingarten

Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names
By Soraya Peerbaye
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2009
108 pp. $18.95

For the most part, it is difficult to believe that Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names is Soraya Peerbaye’s first collection of poetry. Consistently, her volume demonstrates a mature balance of poetic authority, erudition, and emotional depth. She crafts some heartbreakingly confessional poems; a series of poems, for instance, are negotiations of her mother’s depression and the speaker’s inheritance of this emotional turmoil. Other poems are almost topographical, both emotionally and geographically; they trace a Melvillean path through the Antarctic and ponder the abundance of whalebones. Her engagement with such a variety of histories and myths are at least as engrossing as her evocative poetic and poignant voice. In this regard, perhaps one of the collection’s flaws is the poet’s resistance to varying, too, her tone and voice. This is a moot point, though, and it should be bluntly stated: Peerbaye’s collection is superb.

With regard to her poetic structure, Peerbaye is generally quite conscious of, and draws attention to, her writing as poetry. “We goat-head into the wind, zero point five knots / north-west, only / to hold our position. Caesura. Before / a vast white wall, we work ourselves up to some kind of wisdom” (73). Peerbaye typically writes in this style: she adroitly renders real-world snapshots that catalyze her need for metapoetic metaphors. Her world is one infused with poetry. That being said, her coalescence of Romantic idealism and modern poetic style is wonderfully attractive for readers. Note, for instance, the sublimity of passages such as this one:

Whalebone, boat hull: constellation
of a holocaust, and still,
beauty, beauty,

blue water against red earth,
red earth against blue sky. (90)

At times, Peerbaye’s sublime oceanic scenes resemble the awe-inspiring brutality of Herman Melville’s whale hunts in Moby Dick. In fact, sublimity permeates Peerbaye’s poetry. Her speaker’s provocative holocaust metaphor raises for the reader some troubling questions: how can we articulate the sublime beauty of history amidst the fragments of death, the Holocaust, and the numerous other genocides of our collective past? Dogged by such questions, Peerbaye articulates the value of all history, of life and death, of nature’s perseverance and its defeat. The reversed structure of the final lines quoted above offer a vaguely optimistic connectedness amidst the fragments of a dead animal; though, the connective tissue of her chiasmus is ominously red, the colour of blood. The poet often appears attracted to such ambiguous and perplexing articulations of beauty.

In this vein, Peerbaye is prone to interrogating systematicity in her poetry; one of her noticeable interests is the way in which we use and abuse language. The collection is persistently polyphonic: various languages are organically strewn throughout the text. In the monolinguistic poems, such as “Goodness,” the interrogation of language is much deeper. In this poem about a child’s resentment of her ill mother, Peerbaye’s speaker describes a time in which she “played mother, cleaned house / did laundry, washed dishes, / ironed, forged her signature / on my report cards” (51). As she fulfills this maternal role, the speaker struggles to describe the “goodness” of such actions: “good girl, good girl, vengeful in goodness – / scrubbing the house of the smell of her cooking” (51). She struggles to reconcile her good deeds and her execration: can good deeds be performed in moments of hatred? Words therefore trouble Peerbaye’s speaker, as she notes in the final poem: “How necessary / these words are, pebbles dropped into a glass, making / the water rise” (100-1). The line rings ironic, because it sounds almost like a question: how necessary are these words? Yet the persona also admires the multitude and multidimensionality of languages and words. As the enjambed second line suggests, “these words are […] making”; language is an act of ambiguous creation.

There are a number of other fascinating aspects in this collection, but it would take a considerably longer review to elaborate on all of them: the violence / tenderness binaries throughout, Peerbaye’s intense imagery, and the poet’s persistent representation of an audible world, how such audibility affects one’s entire sensorium, and her tendency toward catalogue. In this vein, Peerbaye’s catalogic poetic voice is sometimes too predictable; she tends to use an overabundance of undulating catalogues that, rhythmic though they are, can seem tedious: “clusters of guavas or Bing cherries, / fields of cane flower, fields of snow” (20) or “striated, splotched, / doodled, scribbled, lettered” (60) are but two examples of this stylistic proclivity. That being said, her periodic repetitiveness seems inconsequential when one considers that Peerbaye has auspiciously inaugurated a career of punctilious poems about languages, histories, and stories.