When This World Comes to an End
by Kate Cayley
London, ON: Brick Books, 2013
88 pp. $20
When This World Comes to an End, the first poetry collection by Toronto writer Kate Cayley, uses multiple approaches to present intriguing scenarios. Cayley’s poetry in firmly rooted in the world of creativity, and pictures are an integral part.
The collection has three parts with varying organizing principles. In Book of Days, Cayley includes a dozen poems focussing on such divergent figures as Zola, a servant of Leonardo; Judas; and Persephone. Cayley imagines what it would be like to test Leonardo’s wings—and fall to the earth: “Then I fell. Clutching at time, I went down. / A crunch of bones, / stone. Earth had the last word.” Judas is enjoying life “in a deck chair, watching the water, / his face lined and friendly.” And Persephone eats pomegranate seeds “with a swift tongue.” In short poems, Cayley can create a whole world of queries. One of the most imaginative scenarios is in “Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson Meet in the Afterlife.” While Dickinson and Drake seem antithetical, Cayley seamlessly draws them together, two writers who achieved fame after their deaths.
The second part, Curio: Twelve Photographs, deals directly with words growing out of images. The cover image of a white horse leaping into water from a platform leads to two poems: “The White Horse Divers, Lake Ontario, 1908” and “White Horse Diver #2” and both poems reflect on how the horses may feel in their role as entertainers. The first poem is exquisite, linking the jumps of the horses with human existence: “Be the horse. Be patient and simple, blind / to anything beyond this moment, step out / on trembling legs toward the lake, knowing that / there is something behind this, something / that sustains, propels, repeats.” In the second poem, a sonnet, Cayley pushes further contemplating the “modest sadness” of the horse at being supplanted by vehicles, a “dream suppressed” of “nights of hooves and sky.” What knits these poems together is their denseness, their stellar concreteness.
The third part, Signs and Wonders,” is more varied in topic and style. Five of the selections are prose poems, and of those, “The Girl on the Road” is the most successful, I think, as it’s one long sentence with no interior punctuation. The headlong rush through the poem to its sad conclusion works because of the format. Nothing stops until everything does except for the wind. And as I tend to be drawn to self-referential poetry, my favourite in this part is “Love Poem from the Dictionary,” in which Cayley riffs on the words “Night,” “Absence,” “Clothes,” “Skin,” “Time,” and “Absolve,” drawing them altogether as the poem progresses.
The language in this collection is clear and direct. The beauty of the poems comes from Cayley’s ability to take ordinary objects or experiences and twist our view of them in precise words or to take extraordinary experiences and bring them down to earth—Zola jumping in his wings, horses jumping into water.
I so enjoyed reading the stories in Bombay Wali. Every story was uniquely presented to evoke a sense of nostalgia and empathy for the characters.
Look forward to more publications from Guernica.