{"id":244,"date":"2011-05-19T10:36:06","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T10:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/?page_id=244"},"modified":"2011-09-25T01:27:43","modified_gmt":"2011-09-25T01:27:43","slug":"e-martin-nolan","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/writings\/reviews\/e-martin-nolan\/","title":{"rendered":"E. Martin Nolan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poetry Reviews<\/strong><\/h3>\n
E. Martin Nolan<\/h6>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rough Wilderness: The Imaginary Love Poems of the Abbess of Heloise <\/em><\/p>\n

by Rosemary Aubert<\/p>\n

Toronto, ON: Quattro Books, 2011<\/p>\n

68 pp. $16.95<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rough Wilderness<\/em> follows the story of Heloise, who you might say was ahead of her time (the twelfth century). Before she was \u201cone of the most admired women of her time\u201d due to her \u201cefficient running\u201d of the Paraclete monastery, Heloise was a bright and passionate spirit who was tutored by Abelard, a young but \u201crenowned philosopher and teacher.\u201d The two \u201cfell passionately in love,\u201d but their love was doomed by both social constrictions and Abelard\u2019s refusal to challenge those constrictions. In the end, Abelard, an \u201carrogant and stubborn man,\u201d decided it was best for the lovers, though they were married, to take the holy orders and live out their lives separated in theological loneliness.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis suited Abelard,\u201d Rosemary Aubert writes, but \u201cHeliose never came to grips with it.\u201d In fact, all the background information above comes from Aubert\u2019s one-page summary of the lovers\u2019 story, which appears before the poet dives into the mind of her heroine. Therein lies the problem with this collection, but as that problem is by no means overwhelming, allow me to point out what is working here before I delve into the deficiencies.<\/p>\n

By speaking through the voice of Heliose, Aubert opens up a wide spectrum of poetic possibilities, and the poet takes good advantage of those. First of all, there is the imaginary play made possible by the near-millennial gap between poet and subject. Taking advantage of this, Aubert provides what feels like a realistic glimpse into Heliose\u2019s narrow world while allowing just enough of her own twenty-first century perspective to leak through, creating a voice that is at once novel but vaguely familiar. Of course, much of this familiarity comes from the fact that Heliose\u2019s oppression is not far different than that which was routinely forced upon women until fairly recently in \u201cmodern\u201d societies (and which is still common in so much of the world). Aubert, after all, presents a young women who wishes \u201cfor books,\u201d \u201cto travel across the channel to England\/and over the mountains to Rome,\u201d and \u201cfor a man,\u201d but who could have very little of what she wished for. This is the story of a woman seeking liberation, if only in private, and as such it is strange only in that it occurred so long ago and is yet so familiar.<\/p>\n

But this familiarity is not total; Rough Wilderness<\/em> also manages to reproduce a perspective of the world that is so limited that it produces the strangeness one might expect from a twelfth-century voice. All of these poems are lyrical and are written strictly from Heliose\u2019s point of view. As would have been common in her day, Heliose is left mostly on her own when it comes to learning worldly ways, and the reader is allowed to listen in on her inquires into theology, family and, most importantly, sex. In this context, Aubert\u2019s frequent use of formal structure is appropriate, even when\u2014or maybe especially when\u2014her use of form is rather stiff, like the rules governing Helios\u2019 society and her place therein. Such is especially the case with the \u201cAs Sheba to Solomon\u201d sequence near the middle of Rough Wilderness<\/em>, in which repetition and rhyme feel more like the shackles on Heliose\u2019s mind than they do like devices created to induce pleasure in the reader.<\/p>\n

For the most, part, however, Aubert varies, plays with and abandons set forms well enough to keep the reader engaged. She is comfortable in a variety of forms, including the villanelle, sonnet and pantoum. And these forms generally arrive just at the right moment, with the form lining up nicely with the plot point covered by a given poem. For instance, when Abelard\u2019s abandonment of Heliose begins to sink in, the poet engages with some particularly violent repetition\u2014much sharper than those used earlier to mimic Heliose\u2019s blissful fall for Abelard\u2014in order to illicit the betrayal felt by her heroine. Here\u2019s a taste of that, from \u201cArrogance:\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Arrogance is a small man in a large cloak.<\/p>\n

Arrogance makes popes out of acolytes, saints out of<\/p>\n

popes.<\/p>\n

Arrogance is a loud bird in a vast wood.<\/p>\n

Arrogance pays for mighty forgiveness.<\/p>\n

Arrogance takes its own census and maps its own domain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And here is the nice couplet that proceeds \u201cArrogance.\u201d It\u2019s neatness lends a depressing air of inevitability to Heloise\u2019s despair:<\/p>\n

In all of this no person stopped to ask<\/p>\n

how I, who had so feasted, might learn to fast.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But while these poems nicely mimic the rigid order of Heloise\u2019s world, Aubert also makes good use of free verse to break up the stiffness produced by the forms and to inject that bit of modern perspective mentioned above. Take these lines, from \u201cHis Eyes:\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If I confess, I must admit to<\/p>\n

long corridors lit only by candles<\/p>\n

of such arrogant purity<\/p>\n

that bees would pray to be victim of<\/p>\n

that plunder.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

These lines could easily describe a failed love affair occurring 800 years after Heloise\u2019s birth. Rough Wilderness <\/em>\u00a0is sprinkled with these modern insertions, which also remind us that even the more restricted formal poems here are being filtered through a modern voice. Perhaps the point, then, is not how love in the past and the present differs or aligns, but that there is no point in thinking about it, because it\u2019s always the same. This fact is evident in \u201cSext,\u201d which floats in the middle of the page and of the lover\u2019s bed. It occurs, ostensibly, in the twelfth century, but you would be forgiven for thinking it from the present day:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Startled, he awakes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy are we sleeping at noon?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll love you always.\u201d<\/p>\n

The midday bell sounds again,<\/p>\n

flushing ravens from their perch. <\/ins><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It would seem, between this collection\u2019s formal achievements and its well handled subject matter, that Rough Wilderness<\/em> is a great success. However, as I hinted at above, there is something missing here, and it has to do with narrative. Aubert\u2019s take on the story is inventive and it comes off as authentic and believable, but this collection fails to produce the drama needed to really pull the reader through it with any force. This has much to do with the one-page historical summary Aubert inserts before the poems begin, which provides the reader with a complete account of the lives of Aubert\u2019s subjects. With that accomplished, there is little in the way of plot or arc that the poems themselves can achieve. Implicit in that last statement is the fact that these poems, well good, are not good enough, in and of themselves, to carry the book; they need the book-as-a-whole structure to support them, and that structure fails to hold its weight.<\/p>\n

Try as they might, these poems can only be a commentary on the story told in prose at the book\u2019s start, and commentary alone is not enough to keep Rough Wilderness<\/em> afloat. Certainly, there is much to commended in the collection, but one is left feeling let down by the lack of narrative punch, especially because there it is a narrative being told, and not badly, but for the fact that it is being retold to us. Aubert would have done better to let the narrative unfold through small clues in the voice of Heliose. We could have googled the tale if we really wanted to get it straight. As it is, Rough Wilderness<\/em> holds the clothes of a classic tale, when it could have been that tale\u2019s flesh and blood.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For and Against<\/em><\/p>\n

By Sharon McCartney<\/p>\n

Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2010<\/p>\n

73 p. $17.95<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Coming to Terms with It<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Based on the evidence from For and Against, <\/em>Sharon McCartney has taken Yeats\u2019 advice to \u201cCast a cold eye\/ On life, on death\u201d very seriously. In fact, she has added some foot notes of her own: cast that cold eye on love too, and on the dismissal of love, on family, on animals, cash, horny friends, sex with the Tin Man, risotto, old-man jock-sweat and\u2014keep the knob way to the blue for this one\u2014relationships. These poems are painfully earthbound and completely unsentimental. \u201cDump out the overstuffed drawers\u201d McCartney writes, and \u201cmake room for new disappointments.\u201d<\/p>\n

That sentiment pervades For and Against<\/em>; this is a chronicle of disappointment. From the failed marriage that is the core of this collection, to the long-digested failures and tragedies of the speaker\u2019s family, to the youthful naivet\u00e9 that \u201cdies, the good feeling,\u201d McCartney has concluded that life, indeed, is suffering. Things fall apart, no? Entropy is the fundamental law of nature, right? You\u2019ll get no argument from McCartney. She might respond with this, from \u201cAgainst All That:\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Unfair, unfair, <\/em>I said<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>weak with dread and certainty that no matter<\/p>\n

where I hid despair would find me. So goodbye<\/p>\n

to vacuous drunken laughter, unabashed<\/p>\n

stripping under stars, goodbye to six-packs on<\/p>\n

a charcoal beach, goodbye to hapless kisses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

However, this dismissal of happiness, this acceptance of despair, does not condemn the speaker to a life of hardship and suffering. Rather, it allows the speaker to accept such a life, and ultimately to survive it by detaching from it. And there\u2019s an added bonus to this: she can dismiss the negatives that come along with being attached to the happiness she once felt. Again from \u201cAgainst All That:\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Once and forever goodbye to regret. To stupidity.<\/p>\n

To my father\u2019s third wife. And good riddance<\/p>\n

to a bald excuse with no more to show than<\/p>\n

the red shirt that\u2019s wearing thin on its bony hide.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Still, the decision to give up on happiness does not simply reward itself, especially because McCartney does not just detach from it. Indeed, she retains an intimate connection to her subjects while refusing to submit to them. This requires a certain level of mental toughness, and McCartney\u2019s poems are a deep reservoir of that. Take, for example, \u201cFor My sister\u2019s brain.\u201d The harsh reality of her sister\u2019s condition\u2014\u201cher brain cratered\/ by cancer\u201d\u2014does not sadden or defeat the speaker. Again, this book\u2019s voice is intensely intimate, but although she is clearly affected by her sister\u2019s condition, this instance of pain only seems to clarify the speaker\u2019s perspective. After a night\u2019s attempt of running away, the speaker returns to her sister\u2019s sickroom, where her mother is tending to her \u201cvegetative\u201d child.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A surreal scene, my mother bathing my sister\u2019s<\/p>\n

ivory-blue body, a green cloth between the legs,<\/p>\n

swabbing the stomach tube, the trach, stretching<\/p>\n

the limp limbs ten times. I think now it must have<\/p>\n

been a way to shame me. But the lesson was lost.<\/p>\n

I had no shame. My sister\u2019s brain set me free.<\/p>\n

Nothing I could ever do could cause that much pain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thus, in seven lines, McCartney breaks down the self\u2019s relation to the universe. Her lack of shame has allowed her to gauge the true nature of her limited responsibility toward what she cannot change. Another might have been tempted to bemoan her helplessness in witnessing this tragic scene, but McCartney sees it for what it actually is; while she is cognizant of the scene\u2019s intensity, she goes ahead and skips the bemoaning part. Instead, she takes comfort in the fact that she need not feel responsible for \u201cthat much pain,\u201d which can only be the doing of something far beyond her realm of influence.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this is the kind of realization that must be constantly renewed if one is to go on engaging with the world and its discontents, and especially if one is to engage as intensely as does McCartney. So the confrontation with engagement rages on, and in McCartney\u2019s world the heavy fighting is concentrated in love, sex and marriage. Of a dying cat, McCartney writes, \u201cSay it: nothing will restore\/ her health. And yet, remark her purr, her carriage,\/ how she embodies our marriage.\u201d The dying marriage referred to there haunts this book, taking it over slowly like a snake squeezing drugged prey. Eventually, the failure of a 20-year marriage is brought to mind by a dog sprayed by a skunk, an incident that finds the speaker \u201cspitting,\/ throat constricting, betrayal\u2019s rot lingering long past love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even for the tough-minded McCartney, the failure of a marriage\u2014in addition to the few other failed flings that are alluded to\u2014is tough to swallow. In \u201cAgainst Marriage,\u201d she describes the post-marriage situation: \u201cDays\/ dribbled in goblets of bitterness: how stupid\/ I was, how little it matters, craving that liquor.\u201d Meanwhile, in \u201cCrux\u201d the speaker claims that, in the aftermath of her marriage, \u201cI\u2019m not angry, just a bit crushed.\u201d But, again, this is no reason to complain, or as that line concludes, it\u2019s just \u201cmy problem,\u201d as opposed to anything the reader should feel bad about. It may come off as incidental or tacked on, but it is that ownership of her problem that allows the speaker to persevere through what has been a very difficult time. Because she does this not by avoiding her pain but by confronting it head-on, she can still allow herself to relish what she never wanted to let go, as in \u201cFor Pigeon Lake:\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I can almost smell the dryness<\/p>\n

of those times, the beauty and tension, crickets and jackdaws,<\/p>\n

the cool lake percolating at the edge of the brow beaten lawn.<\/p>\n

Happy just to be with you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A similar sentiment accompanies the speaker\u2019s memory of more booze-filled days, with \u201ca cold pint on a hot deck, chocolate stout from Quebec, windowless\/ taverns, banquettes and bartenders\u2026 I miss all that.\u201d She misses it, but she has also let it go, \u201cloving\/ it as I do, sincerely, from a smaller house down the road.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can imagine this whole collection was written from that house, with the poet conjuring hard, important memories until she knew every crack they\u2019d formed in her psyche, then filling those cracks until the foundation stabilized and she could once again remember past the pain to the beauty for which she risked that pain at all. It is a small marvel, as a reader, to watch this process play out, especially given McCartney\u2019s lyrical mastery, which is never heavy-handed\u2014is in fact very low-key\u2014but is nonetheless sneakily gorgeous. Take the first line from \u201cAgainst Sanitation:\u201d \u201cAntiseptic dichromatic funereal smell of floral bleach.\u201d Just a great line. Or the final lines from \u201cCrux:\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This completely sucks, but I don\u2019t hate you.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s self-disgust. The years in which I chose<\/p>\n

not to see, disbelieving distance, indifference.<\/p>\n

Time to shift gears, let out the clutch.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notice how the \u201cU\u201d organizes the sound in this quatrain, the short clauses highlight rhythmic cadences (\u201cthis completely sucks\u201d=\u201dlet out the clutch\u201d) and how she allows the \u201cD\u2019s\u201d to cluster in the middle lines. This is gritty confessionalism, but with the lyrical chops\u2014and the wisdom\u2014to raise the poems to a rarified air at the same time that they stay firmly planted in the ground.<\/p>\n

For and Against<\/em> is a confessional collection of the finest caliber. It is as raw as it gets, but it never allows itself to be trapped in its own drama. McCartney has written a book that is wholly internally driven, but with a core hard enough to withstand a total embrace of pain while producing lyrical gems to make any poet jealous. These poems are not \u201cfor\u201d anything\u2014detachment, love, pain, passion, etc.\u2014sometimes and \u201cagainst\u201d it other times. They are both \u201cfor and against\u201d all of these things all of the time, simultaneously. McCartney has revealed our deepest and most difficult contradictions with humbleness, grace courage. That is no small feat.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poetry Reviews E. Martin Nolan   Rough Wilderness: The Imaginary Love Poems of the Abbess of Heloise by Rosemary Aubert Toronto, ON: Quattro Books, 2011 68 pp. $16.95 \u00a0 Rough Wilderness follows the story of Heloise, who you might say was ahead of her time (the twelfth century). Before she was \u201cone of the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":77,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-244","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":718,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/244\/revisions\/718"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}