[the young ladies during a recent "sick day," home from school / preschool] Here I go again. And who am I to go against tradition?
Well, the good traditions, anyway. Here is my annual list of the seemingly-arbitrary
“worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive designation),
constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout
the past year. This is my eighth annual
list [see also: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] since dusie-maven Susana Gardner originally suggested various dusie-esque poets write up their
own versions of same, and I thank her both for the ongoing opportunity, and the
prompting that started me off in the first place.
I’ve been far less active as a reviewer this past year than I may have wished, given I’m home with our two young ladies (Rose turned 5
in November, and Aoife turns 3 this coming April). Two reviews a week is still
a pretty hefty goal, and there are multiple books that I haven’t been able to
get into (yet, he says, rather optimistically). Although my mounds
of not-yet-reviewed are beginning to overwhelm my home office. I’ve books by my
desk I haven’t had nearly a chance to get to, including Laurie Fuhr’s Night Flying (Frontenac House Poetry),
Gwen Benaway’s Holy Wild (Book*hug), and
most likely multiple other titles I just can’t see at the moment. I haven’t even
seen a copy yet of Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, edited by Alessandro Porco (WLU Press), or Flow: Poems Collected and New by Roy Miki, edited by Michael Barnholden, beholden, by Fred Wah and Rita Wong or Treaty 6 Deixis, by Christine Stewart (Talonbooks). Perhaps, given how long this
list actually is, you might be okay with the fact that I didn’t get to as much
as I might have liked (otherwise you might be here all day). You can’t even
imagine how long it takes me to compile and post these things as it is (but
there you go).
But here it is, my list of twenty-four titles worth-repeating:
1.
Nikki Sheppy, Fail Safe. This is a 2017 title
that I received too late to appear on last year’s list, so I include such here.
Calgary
poet Nikki Sheppy’s long-awaited first full-length poetry collection is Fail Safe (University of Calgary Press,
2017), a complex and playful examination of the machinery of languages and
architecture, what back cover blurber Weyman Chan refers to as a “sensory
grenade.” The poems in Fail Safe
engage with structures as well as the failures and traps of same, and the
recognition that one shouldn’t be distracted away from what is actually going
on. Her poems are incredibly muscular, dense and visceral, able to move with
the speed of light. There is an element of the catch-all to Sheppy’s
collection, deliberately constructing a book in which anything and everything
might belong, fitting each piece up against the next both neatly and in a
perfect jumble. Fail Safe gives the impression of a book asking how books are
built at all, providing both question and answer, exploring the building blocks
of how one poem sits up against another to create something beyond the sum of
their individual parts. See my full review here.
2. Jack Davis, Faunics. Another title from 2017: occasionally a book of
poetry appears, seemingly out of nowhere, that is openly discussed between
poets as a ‘must read’ well before any reviews or notices have appeared, as is
the case with poet Jack Davis’ remarkable debut, Faunics (St. John’s, NL: Pedlar Press, 2017). Faunics owes a debt to Nelson Ball and Mark Truscott, both of whom
are acknowledged, both as notes at the end of the collection as well as
individual dedications, for their influences upon his work. Because of this,
Davis’ poems aren’t merely short or short-lined, but poems that fully
comprehend the lessons of what Ball and Truscott (and others, including
jwcurry, Cameron Anstee, Michael e. Casteels) and others have been working on
for years (it might be worth pointing out that Anstee, also, has a debut
collection set to appear very soon), writing an incredibly precise lyric of sustained
attention. Davis engages in what has been referred
to as “quietude,” an incredibly detailed attention to smallness, silence and
lines as short as a single word. Nearly one hundred and forty pages thick,
Davis’ Faunics is smallness
multiplied and magnified, composed of short, intricate and dense lyric poems
that weave their ways through language, space and multiple species of birds,
animals and fauna. He writes of listening, sparrows, asides, winter and
counterweights, attending to his most immediate and intimate in ways both
startlingly familiar and completely refreshing. As he writes to open the poem
“Curtail”: “All beautiful / of pieces // every flesh / desired // found breath
/ our bodies // the broken-into warmth / of animals [.]” There is such a deep
and abiding respect and attentiveness in these pages, in which he attends far
more to his Northern Ontario surroundings than to the facts, or even the
distractions of, his own presence. As he writes to open the poem “Edible
Forests and Potable Waterways of Northern Ontario”: “Music / pushed through /
flax & pigment / played into / other woods [.]” See my full review here.
3. angela rawlings, si tu: I know, but I’ll get
to the 2018 books soon. angela rawlings’ si
tu (March, 2017), is “a poetic response to Marjana Krajač’s choreography
Variations on Sensitive,” produced by Multimedijalni Intitut in Zagreb. For
those awaiting a follow-up to her debut, Wide
slumber for lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), rawlings’
creative output since then has been wide-ranging, multidisciplinary and
seemingly-constant—something suggested through her 2016 interview over at Touch the Donkey—and a process not
necessarily limited to the published book, but one that moves through
performance, dance, visuals and text. rawlings’ si tu is reminiscent, slightly, of Chicago poet Carrie Olivia
Adams’ collaborative GRAPPLE
(above/ground press, 2016), a work that engaged dance with the lyric, yet
rawlings’ respose is one far more attuned to the visual materials of text on a
page, and how sound and motion are expressed in the space of two dimensions,
coming to her response not through the lyric, but through a far more
experimental and multidisciplinary sense of how the building blocks of visual
language can be applied.
I’m
fascinated by rawlings’ approach in responding to a work I haven’t seen (which
can provide its own benefit, not allowing the comparison to her source as
distraction), yet able to grasp a sense of Krajač’s choreography as rawlings
moves through description, sound and motion, writing fragments and sentences up
against space, as words are reworked, transposed and translated, flipped,
scattered and structured on a grid. “To put the mouth on. / To put the mouth on
it. / To put the mouth on iz. // But as professionals, one / is not always so
worried / about the safety of / professionelles.” Really, the performative
element of sound and motion in this text is key, one that allows even the most
casual reader to be present in this work as performance. See my full review here.
4. Minola Review: A
Journal of Women’s Writing, an anthology edited by Robin Richardson. Anthologies count too,
right? In the introduction to Minola
Review: A Journal of Women’s Writing, a newly-released print anthology
compiled as a ‘best-of’ her online journal, editor/publisher Robin Richardson
speaks of the need for a separate space in which to work and present work, one
that doesn’t come with experiences such as, she recounts, being shamed for
dancing at a dance party at thirteen. As she writes: “What if I could create a
space where my girlfriends and I could dance however we want? Where we wouldn’t
worry about coming across too sexy or too unsexy, too goofy or unhinged. We
could have the freedom simply to move.”
I
always appreciate being introduced to the work of writers I haven’t yet had the
opportunity to read, and I was quite taken with the prose of Kara Vernor and
Madeleine Maillet, two further writers I hadn’t yet heard of. Editor/publisher
Richardson’s interests clearly lean toward a relatively straightforward lyric
narrative, with much of the work collected here existing in that vein, with the
occasional prose piece with an added extra music, such as Vernor’s striking “IF
YOU’RE WITH A GIRL AND YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE SEX WITH ANOTHER GIRL, BUT YOU’RE
ON YOUR PERIOD AND YOU’RE WEARING A TAMPON, CAN YOU STILL? DO PEOPLE EVER DO
THAT?,” a piece that really does seem to (apart from being an entertaining
piece willing to laugh at itself) roll to an entirely different kind of music. See my full review here.
5. Emma Healey,
stereoblind. Toronto
poet Emma Healey’s second full-length poetry collection, after Begin with the End in Mind (Arp Books,
2012), is stereoblind (Toronto ON:
Anansi, 2018), an accumulation of prose poems “about the differences / between
things, how they disappear.” Deftly moving in and out of focus, Healey’s poems
are present, mutable and grounded, while still able to simply float off into
the ether.
I find the prose of Healey’s lines rather
curious, how she manages to write both direct and indirect, dodging the easy
path by writing what appear to be rather straight lines, and is reminiscent,
somewhat, of recent works by Toronto poet Sennah Yee and New York poet Dorothea
Lasky for their similar abilities to write directly askance via the lyric
sentence. There is something dreamlike in Healey’s poems, allowing a kind of
magical element to her narratives which equally fuels and comforts the
narrator’s ongoing anxieties. The poem “N12” exists an extended lyric sequence
that sits squarely in the middle of the collection, stitching and securing the
entirety of the book together, managing to become the book’s foundation, akin
to a title poem with a different title. And when she writes this in the midst
of the poem, I believe her: “I want to lay my life out in clean lines, to show
you how good I am at leaving nothing undone, touching right wire to right wire,
lighting it up. a solved equation with my self erased completely. I want to
deliver the answer to me across time and come out lighter. But every time I write,
it sounds like wringing apology from my own throat.” See my full review here.
6. Mikko Harvey,
Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit. New York City resident and Canadian expat
Mikko Harvey’s first poetry collection is Unstable
Neighbourhood Rabbit (Anansi, 2018), a collection of odd lyrics, narratives
and fables. The lyrics in Harvey’s Unstable
Neighbourhood Rabbit unfold and unfurl to reveal succeeding layers of
narrative oddities, such as the poem “THIRD DATE,” that opens: “We watched a
yellow butterfly bounce, bounce, / then get annihilated by a truck, which cast
a wing-sized shadow / over our trip to the state park. It was there, under the
sugar / maple canopy, darling, that I learned of your hypoglycemia.” Where does
a poem go from there? There are those say that the best thing a poem can do is
to explore the already-familiar in an entirely new way, providing a fresh
perspective that allows the reader to experience the world with new eyes, and
this appears to be what Mikko Harvey brings to the lyric, offering the surreal
through a rather straightforward narrative, one that twists and turns even as
it holds entirely still, offering a line solid enough that any bird would trust
to land upon it. Through Harvey, there is a comfort to the narrative
uncertainty, one that reveals an array of surreal experiences and stories, both
light and dark, that become entirely familiar, and work to twist expectation,
but never unsettle. See my full review here.
7. George Bowering,
Some End / George Stanley, West Broadway. I find this double collection by
Vancouver poets George Bowering and George Stanley fascinating, a dos-à -dos
flip book made up of Bowering’s “Some End” and Stanley’s “West
Broadway”(Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018). With each section running
roughly forty pages in length, both Bowering and Stanely write in and around
their Vancouver geographies and concerns, from aging—Stanley’s “Blood is toxic
to the retina” from the poem “5,” or Bowering’s “Does it bring any solace or
calm to you / to know the sun is mortal, too?” from “Bright”—to the ins and outs of reading, friends and
their immediate locales. Around 2005 or so, I heard the two illustrious senior
Canadian poets read together at a festival in Vancouver alongside George
Elliott Clarke, and the three Georges were fascinating to watch in sequence,
given their individual penchants for deep rhythms, and their reading habits of
each conducting their readings with one hand.
The
two sections do hold to each other in conversation, continuing their individual
trajectories from decades of work that also discover the places in which they
meet, and overlap, from Stanley’s “Letter to George Bowering” that responds to
Bowering’s “Letter to George Stanley,” or Bowering’s “The Country North of
Summer,” a poem that plays off a combination of George Stanley’s North of California St. (New Star Books,
2014) and Gentle Northern Summer (New
Star, 1995). Curiously, the poem itself doesn’t engage with Stanley directly,
but is instead a meditation to and for the late Al Purdy: “The grave wherein my
pen pal is laid lies / at the bottom of a country road saying his name. / It’s
a dandy place to lean against the stone book / and read a bunch of poems,
except in winter.” Bowering, through dozens upon dozens of works of poetry,
fiction and criticism, has been a frequent responder to and commentator upon
the works of others, from contemporaries to mentors to heroes and anyone else
whose work might cross his path and connect, and his section includes numerous
threads and structures familiar to anyone who has spent time with any of his
prior work. Much can be said also of George Stanley’s “West Broadway,” a
section that opens with an extended sequence, “West Broadway,” stretched across
a specific thread of Vancouver geography. Some
End/West Broadway is an intriguing conversation between these two senior
Vancouver poets who have been friends for decades, and poets for far longer,
writing towards each other in such a way as to highlight their shared
sensibilities, as well as their differences. See my full review here.
8. Cameron Anstee, Book
of Annotations.
Following years’ worth of chapbooks (through In/Words, above/ground press, Apt.
9 Press, Puddles of Sky Press, Baseline Press, The Emergency Response Unit,
etcetera) comes Ottawa poet, editor and small press publisher Cameron Anstee’s
long-awaited full-length poetry debut, Book
of Annotations (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018), a collection of
what Nelson Ball calls “minimalist gems”: incredibly short and playful poems
packed with enormous density. Part of the appeal of such a collection emerges
from his engagement with (and obvious love for) similar works by poets working
in similar veins, something acknowledged on the back cover: “a dialogue in
shorthand with H.D., Nelson Ball, Lorine Niedecker, Aram Saroyan, Phillis Webb,
Robert Lax, and others.” Others, I suspect, might include Mark Truscott,
jwcurry, Michael e. Casteels, Gary Barwin and bpNichol.
Structured
in five untitled but numbered sections, this too furthers the minimalism of
Anstee’s poems, allowing the reader to see the connections between and amid
poems, some of which is obvious, deceptive and quite subtle, in poems built on
erasure, repetition, hesitation and the quiet pause. There is such deliberate
care to these poems, crafted and sculpted and incredibly small, some as
deliberate as a single word. It has been curious to see more than a couple of
contemporary poets over the past few years explore just how small a poem can
be, some of which were solicited by Stuart Ross for his poetry journal Peter O’Toole: The Journal of One-Line Poems
(Proper Tales Press), but Anstee’s is obviously an ongoing interest, as opposed
to a series of one-offs quickly composed. See my full review here.
9. Suzanne Zelazo, Lances
All Alike.
After far too long a wait comes a second trade poetry collection from Toronto
poet, editor and critic Suzanne Zelazo—Lances
All Alike (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2018)—following her debut, Parlance (Coach House Books, 2003). Not
that she has been idle or absent, having held
a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Ryerson University under Irene Gammel,
exploring experimental writers and poets including Mina Loy, Elsa von
Freytag-Loringhoven and Florine Stettheimer, and co-edited, with Gammel, the
critically-acclaimed collections Crystal
Flowers: Poetry and a Libretto by Florine Stettheimer (Toronto ON: BookThug,
2010) and Body Sweats : The Uncensored Writings
of Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (The MIT Press, 2011). As Parlance emerged from Zelazo’s readings
of and research into Virginia Woolf (specifically, To the Lighthouse), Lances
All Alike emerges from her work on Loy and Freytag-Loringhoven.
Zelazo’s
collage-poems explore the potential collisions and collusions between two
wildly individual contemporaries that, supposedly, and bafflingly, might not
have interacted during their lifetimes. In an interview posted at Touch the Donkey in 2015 on the project,
then still in-progress, Zelazo explained: “The poems are characteristic of what
I’ve been working on for a while now— a modernist conversation between the
Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven and Mina Loy, and a more general
consideration of artistic influence. […] As in my first book, collage is central, but I
think the collection explores voice—the simultaneity of voices—very
differently.” It’s curious to see Zelazo’s ongoing exploration of female
modernist writers, engaging the intersections between Mina Loy and Baroness
Elsa, even as her first collection explored (less blended than this current
work, but still seeking points of common entry) the work of Virginia Woolf
against an elegy for Zelazo’s late mother. She might be engaging in modernist
conversation, but through a postmodern lens, reassembling the narrative through
fractal, clipped fragment and deliberate obsfucation, thus opening up the
possibility of entirely new directions in the narrative; influenced by, as Sina
Queyras suggested in a note on Parlance
in 2005, collage-and-chance poets such as Jackson Mac Low. See my full review here.
10. Emilia Nielsen,
Body Work. I’m
impressed by poet Emilia Nielsen’s sophomore collection, Body Work (Signature Editions, 2018), a considerable leap from her
Gerald Lampert Award-nominated debut, Surge
Narrows (Leaf Press, 2013). Nielsen is a British Columbia poet set to join
York University in Toronto this summer as Assistant Professor in the Department
of Social Science, in the Health and Society Program, and her Body Works writes the body as both a
topic of study and of revision, managing both to articulate and rewrite,
re-stitch and map an intricate series of patterns across the skin of each page.
There is a meditative quality to Nielsen’s poems, but one akin to the language
fractals of poets such as Margaret Christakos, Sylvia Legris or Christine
McNair, composing pieces that concurrently seem less constructed than
disassembled for the purpose of study and labelling, and precisely jumbled,
jagged and staccato.
Nielsen’s
lyric sequences exist as explorations, picking and pinpointing of minutae
around the body, and are remarkable for their vibrancy and sheer precision.
Much as in Legris’ ongoing work, Nielsen’s cavalcade of body-study revels in
language and in such exacting precision. As she write in the sequence “Surgical
Notes”: “That I function well without an organ / but don’t have the know-how to stitch
/ a button back in place. Lacking how-to / to do a tidy job.” See my full review here.
11. Annick MacAskill,
No Meeting Without Body. Lyric precision and lyric polish aren’t, as I might not
really need to explain, the same thing. And while my interest in the lyric
doesn’t necessarily gravitate towards the polish of a more straightforward
line, there is something about the poems in Halifax poet Annick MacAskill’s
debut, No Meeting Without Body
(Gaspereau Press, 2018), that compel my attention. Her poems are narrative,
sure, but hardly straightforward, achieving an accumulation of thoughts and
movement, as well as the occasional narrative disjunction and disruption,
composed as polished poems both precise and slightly jagged, slightly off;
punchy and visceral. She knows how to compose poems that suggest one purpose,
and provide something slightly different (such as her attempts to twist certain
Canadian standards), all while moving through a series of meditative,
first-person lyric narratives. The poems in No
Meeting Without Body range from good to compelling, and often with such a
nebulous difference between that it becomes difficult to articulate. Needless
to say, there are a couple of poems here that left me breathless. See my full review here.
12. Robin Richardson,
Sit How You Want.
There is a sharpness and a confidence to the first person monogues in Toronto
writer Robin Richardson’s third full-length poetry collection, Sit How You Want (Vehicule Press, 2018),
even as the poems explore trauma, terror and powerlessness, and the ways in
which one might finally emerge.
While
Sit How You Want isn’t, specifically,
a collection of “unsympathetic poems,” the idea is one not unrelated to the
poems at hand, in which the narrator/s speak of love and damage, depression and
regret, and fearlessness versus fear. As she writes, both in a kind of mocking
self-dismissal as well as declaration of being and purpose, in the poem “ABOUT
THE SPEAKER”: “I am built of myth and girly bits.” These are poems pushing to
break free from abusive relationships, both familial and romantic; poems
composed via a narrator (or narrators) that has survived, although not without
scars, such as the gloriously-titled “EARTHQUAKES ARE MY FAVOURITE WAY / TO
MAKE ISLANDS,” that begins: “We ignored the cries of the carbon monoxide /
detector, coitussed in a pose like Pompeii / corpses while the cabbies grew
irate outside. / This is the last day of our lives, until tomorrow. / When I
say I’m fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy [.]” See my full review here.
13. Eve Joseph,
Quarrels.
I’m very taken with Eve Joseph’s third collection, of self-designated “prose
poems,” Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018). I find the range of what is
described as “prose poems” to be rather curious, running the full gamut from
prose to lyric in ways that occasionally make the designation imperfect.
Joseph’s poems, for example, exist far closer to what American poet Russell
Edson (1935-2014), said to be the father of the American prose poem, composed,
a style seemingly akin to the short stories (a form also referred to as
“postcard fictions”) of J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces
for the Left Hand (2005), yet far less poetic than the short stories of
Lydia Davis. These are prose poems, therefore, closer to the prose end of the
spectrum, far from the more poetic prose poems of poets such as Cole Swensen,
Norma Cole and Rosmarie Waldrop. Really, to investigate the designation of the
“prose poem” causes the description to lose focus, especially when so many
contemporary poets utilize line breaks rather arbitrary, breaking a series of
otherwise full sentences down into what gets called poetry. What does it all
mean? I suppose, in the end, the designation also exists for the sake of
describing against what it is not, and that is a lyric existing with line
breaks.
Either
way, this is a gorgeous and accomplished book, and Joseph deserves enormous
credit and attention for it, composed through an accumulation of sentences that
appear straightforward, but toggle the lyric, instead, through that same
accumulation of connections and disconnections. Set in three sections, her
short, untitled pieces explore movements and moments, disagreements and
differences, writing out short scenes, and even, as through the second section,
composed from photographs by Diane Arbus. Each piece remains self-contained,
yet part of a far larger series of grouped connections, akin to ripples running
across and through the book as a whole. See my full review here.
14. Eric Schmaltz,
SURFACES. There
is a delight to seeing what Toronto poet Eric Schmaltz has accomplished with
his first full-length title, SURFACES
(Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018), a title rightly listed equally as
poetry, graphic arts and typography. My first real interaction with Schmaltz’
work came in the form of a chapbook manuscript, produced through above/ground
press as MITSUMI ELEC. CO. LTD.: keyboard
poems (2014). As he wrote in an email as part of his original submission,
the chapbook was “an homage to Paul Dutton’s The Plastic Typewriter.” Toronto poet Dutton’s work, produced by
Underwhich Editions in 1993, is described as a “Compilation of concrete or
visual poetry that goes beyond the way the typewriter is traditionally used to
make impressions on to a piece of paper. Completed in 1977, materials used were
a disassembled plastic case typewriter, an intact typewriter, carbon ribbons,
carbon paper, metal file and white bond paper.”
The
past twenty-odd years of Canadian writing has been wonderfully rich in the
production of visual and concrete works, an explosion of publishing, producing
and curiosity that seemed to come out of nowhere, with dozens of writers and
artists now composing and producing, from the older writers who have been
working away for decades—jwcurry, bill bissett and Judith Copithorne, for
example—to the mid-career practitioners—derek beaulieu, Gary Barwin, W. Mark
Sutherland, Sharon Harris, Billy Mavreas, Christian Bök and Helen Hajnoczky—to
the array of emerging writer quietly moving their own ways through multiple
threads of history to begin producing their own works—Sacha Archer, Kate
Siklosi, Kyle Flemmer, Ken Hunt and Dani Spinosa (these lists aren’t meant to
be exhaustive, but simply to give a quick sense of some gatherings of
activity). All of this activity is impressive, and the benefits of a growing
community of practitioners in the digital age have allowed the work being
produced to be more thoughtful, and often presented in deep conversation with
other works already produced (Spinosa, for example, has been working on some
very interesting homage pieces over the past few years). All of this to say
that, while Schmaltz’ work is part of something larger and grander, it has also
become one of its ongoing highlights, something SURFACES can’t help but broadcast. See my full review here.
15. Caroline Szpak,
Slinky Naïve.
Toronto writer Caroline Szpak’s first trade poetry title, following a small
handful of poetry chapbooks, is Slinky
Naïve (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018), a collection of poems constructed
as narrative accumulations and odd turns. Szpak’s poems give the appearance of
randomness, with line upon accumulated line until the narrative threads click,
and finally reveal themselves. There is a looseness here that is quite
appealing, and a series of threads that could never be anticipated, coming together
brilliantly to form a collection of intriguing and even unusual poems. As she
writes in the poem “BLACK MADONNA”: “a crawl in residents / that feel the water
/ tastes sweet may be / part pigment / edible cosmetics a loss / of emphasis
fine tuning / sweat must have eyelids / like a husband a school / group sells
shoddy / in that mud state .]” See my full review here.
16. Paul Vermeersch,
Self Defence for the Brave and Happy. Toronto poet and editor Paul Vermeersch’s
sixth trade poetry collection is Self
Defence for the Brave and Happy (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2018), a playful
sequence of narratives blending classic imagery of spacemen, rockets and
missiles with an updated fear of the impending apocalypse, and what just might
come next.
While
the collection might begin in some rather dark places, Vermeersch’s use of
humour, pop culture, surrealism and collage work to disarm the increasing
anxieties surrounding the darkest possibilities of humanity’s demise. The poems
that make up Self Defence for the Brave
and Happy respond to climate change to the failures of science, wholescale
self-destruction and an array of violence. Poems such as “DON’T WAIT FOR THE
WOODSMAN,” “ON BEING WRONG” and “THE FAILURE OF THE HUMAN BODY AS AN ART FORM”
even work as short poem-shaped essays – a fascinating counterpoint to the
visual poems contained within – composed on the failures of expectation,
writing on stories, existence and decision-making, adding to a collection as a
whole that engages in twisting and shifting expectation and perspective. Between
the lyric narratives, essay-poems and visual pieces, I’m intrigued by the
broadening of Vermeersch’s structural scope, and how everything contained fits
so nicely together. See my full review here.
17. Julie Bruck, How to
Avoid Huge Ships.
There is something incredibly compelling about Canadian expat Julie Bruck’s new
poetry collection, How to Avoid Huge
Ships (London ON: Brick Books, 2018), something that keeps drawing me in
and holding my attention. While I’m not normally attracted to this particular
strain of narrative lyric, her lines are magnetic. Her poems evoke and evade,
deceptively set as small stories or small scenes, but weaving in observation,
surprise and deep meditation. Her poems have both an ease and a density, and a
physicality to them, as she writes to open the poem “THE COLD”: “Despite
seven—no, eight—months / of steroid sprays, antibiotics, antibacterials, / and
whatever else modern medicine has / flung at it, the cold that finally killed
my father / lives on in me.”
These
are poems that evoke both loss and grief while allowing for a kind of zen
appreciation of her subjects, writing out grief even as her narrator(s) learn
to allow that same grief to pass through the body. Moments, as John Newlove
wrote, not monuments. See my full review here.
18. IF wants to be the
same as IS: Essential Poems of David Bromige, eds. Jack Krick, Bob Perelman and
Ron Silliman. There
isn’t any way to overstate the importance of the publication of IF wants to be the same as IS: Essential
Poems of David Bromige, eds. Jack Krick, Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman,
with an introduction by George Bowering (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018), a
six hundred page volume of collected works by the late David Bromige (October 22, 1933 –
June 3, 2009). Bromige is a poet both seen to exist in Canadian and American
poetries, and yet each side of the border had their own individual, and even
incomplete, portrait of him and his work, comparable to considerations of poet
George Stanley [see my review of Stanley’s 2014 title, North of California St., here], a poet who, himself, emerged in
California before moving north to Vancouver.
Born
in England, Bromige schooled in Vancouver, where he began to engage with a
number of emerging Canadian writers, notably the TISH poets and other downtown Vancouver poets, before moving to
California in 1962. His move south didn’t end his Canadian engagements, despite
moving quickly to engage a variety of American poets and poetries, to the point
that he published books on both sides of the border throughout his writing
career. The multiple perspectives on Bromige’s work is acknowledged, and made
clear, through the construction of the collection itself, with
introductions/afterword by editors Perelman, Krick and Silliman, as well as an
introduction by Bromige’s friend and contemporary, George Bowering.
This
is an important book, one a long time coming. Given some of the attention
provided to other poets across North America, might someone even be willing to
organize a conference on Bromige’s work, now that such a book as this is
finally available? See my full review here.
19. Mark Truscott,
Branches.
Toronto poet Mark Truscott’s third full-length title, Branches (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2018)—following Said Like Reeds or Things (2004) and Nature (2010)—manages a quality of density that feels different than the poems in
his first two collections. The poems in Branches
further his seemingly-ongoing explorations into brevity, meditation,
compactness and the single, extended moment, but there is something else as
well, with poems that, while losing none of their brevity or density, are
longer, and more expansive. His poems rely on a deep and slow kind of
attention, as well as allowing space for the perpetual surprise. There is
something very quiet, and perpetually understated, about Truscott’s work,
unlike the more immediate, even electric, elements of the short poems in
Cameron Anstee’s recent debut of very short shorts [see my review of such
here]. In extremely compelling ways, both poets do write out their silences,
managing to outline near-infinite lines around just how much unspoken their
poems contain, but Truscott’s do in the same way that bare tree branches (to
continue his own metaphor) outline the sky: we know there’s so much more to the
silence than this. We can see it. See my full review here.
20. Michael Turner, 9x11.
The
latest from Vancouver writer Michael Turner is 9x11 (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018), subtitled “and other
poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven.” A follow-up, one might suspect, to his
previous poetry title, 8x10 (New
Star, 2009), both for the minimalist form displayed throughout, as well as the obvious
linkages between titles, but a collection that also plays very much off the ripples
and consequences surrounding September 11, 2001. Composed as short, lyric
vignettes, 9x11 is a book of
distances and collisions, of ground-level street life, including coffeeshops,
corner groceries and contemporary housing anxieties. Turner writes of a
constant, and underlying potential for violence and repeated near misses,
referencing a series of tensions, and acts of terror both contemporary and
historically, such as the poem “Synesthesia,” that includes: “not the opposite
of bombs dropped / concurrently on Hanoi, Nam Dinh and Viet Tri / but the
appearance of an opposite / because what was sent to the moon / and what fell
on North Vietnam / was the coffee mom bought at the supermarket [.]”
In
short, sharp lyric turns, Turner blends the daily mundane with the horrific,
articulating how easily such terror becomes muted, presented and eventually
dismissed, writing out wars in other places, and left far behind, yet with a
violence that often perseveres; carries through, is carried, and continued. As
the press release informs: “How you view 21st century life depends
largely on the view from your place, which depends on where you can afford to
live. In this suite of texts and poems written over twenty years that span the
infamous towers, Michael Turner drops in to see what condition he’s in, a
subject whipped into insistence by the rhythms that shape his city, his
neighbourhood, his universe.” See my full review here.
21. Shazia Hafiz Ramji,
port of being.
Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s debut full-length collection,
winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, is port of being (Picton ON: Invisible
Publishing, 2018). Hers is a collection composed as a book of dislocations,
implications and accumulations via short lyrics that explore borders, violence
and human connection. The poems in port
of being are deliberately constructed to keep the reader off-balance,
employing sequences of fragments that layer upon layer into something
unsettling, writing on violence, distant wars, social media, internet cables,
death, borders and the horror at an increasing disregard of facts. port of being writes from the slippages
of what was once actual or presumed solid ground, writing from a series of
negative and positive shifts, from what hadn’t been acknowledged before, to
what never should have occurred. As she writes to open the poem “Heat”: “Birth
from our own skin // Concerns over devaluation // Body that hangs and holds
[.]” Ramji writes from a dangerous place, one that comes from knowledge and
acknowledgment, attempting to articulate how one might navigate in such a
landscape.
Shazia
Hafiz Ramji’s poems, while betraying the occasional exhaustion, exasperation
and frustration, don’t fall entirely into hopelessness, providing a glimmer of
something beyond mere survival. “In the morning we consider ghosts.” she
writes, to end the poem “Nearness”: “I feel the sun settle on my ear.” See my full review here.
22.
Allison Chisholm, On the Count of None. From Kingston poet and
musician Allison Chisholm comes the debut full-length On the Count of None (Anvil Press, 2018), published as the third
title in Stuart Ross’ “A Feed Dog Book” imprint (an extension of his former
imprint over at Mansfield Press). Following her chapbooks through Puddles of
Sky Press and Proper Tales Press (The
Dollhouse and On the Count of One,
respectively), the poems in On the Count
of None display a curiosity, odd humour and a slant perspective,
occasionally providing a glimpse of something else, something far darker. As
she writes in the poem “The Dollhouse” (the first of a trio of poems with this
title, spread out across the collection): “The approved remedy for loneliness
is / a stiffening expression, a bedfast songbird. / Somewhat by surprise, a
lark, toneless as a tarantella, / enters the dollhouse in Act II / to grasp the
hairpin, unsettle the cigar box.”
Composed
by an incredibly deft hand, Chisholm’s poems exude a meditative calm with the
occasional dark undertone, presenting descriptive offerings of various scenes,
as well as a variety of horoscopes, reinforcing the possibility that her poems
only wish to offer assistance; offering suggestions, but often as a
distraction, as she presents you with a something entirely different. See my full review here.
23. Elee Kraljii
Gardiner, Trauma Head. Vancouver writer Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s second
full-length poetry title is Trauma Head
(Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018), furthering the work she gathered last year
in a self-published chapbook with the same name. As the back cover to the new
collection reads: “In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost
feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was
symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery that opened
an examination of mortality and crisis. This long-poem memoir tracks the
author’s experiences with un/wellness and un/re-familiarity with herself.” The
earlier version, the chapbook-sized TRAUMA
HEAD (Otter Press, 2017; second printing, 2018) was a publication set in a
file-folder of collaged text and images around and through brain scans, injury,
trauma and healing; there was something of the project, even then, that felt
unfinished, as though it were part of some as-yet-unrealized larger project.
Trauma Head is a collection of
fragments, files, bursts and medical records composed as a sequence of
dislocations attempting to ground and connect themselves, seeking out the
shards and scattered threads into something that might cohere into a form
enough to continue breathing. There is such a remarkable and gymnastic display
of sound and fracture, collision and stutter throughout her text, a meditative
scatter of synapses attempting to move at high speed (even to the point of
overlapping, becoming muddied), threading around and across a trauma, and
towards comprehension, and eventual recovery. She writes of fear, and
possibility; she writes of a struggle to survive, and even speak, pushing
through her recovery, both to achieve it and to understand it, and to
communicate the new shape of her gestures. “[P]ain wears me,” she writes,
further into the collection, continuing: “is the tide / chewing cliff face /
pain wears me // this injury tumbles me in the chop / is the tide // chewing
cliff face / any hiatus pain
wears me // in the repetition of panic / this injury tumbles me in the chop /
is the tide [.]” See my full review here.
24. Julie McIsaac, We
Like Feelings. We Are Serious. From Hamilton, Ontario writer Julie McIsaac
comes the expansive and powerful We Like
Feelings. We Are Serious. (Hamilton ON: Buckrider Books/Wolsak & Wynn,
2018), a poetry title that follows on the heels of her debut short story collection,
Entry Level (London ON: Insomniac
Press, 2012). McIsaac’s debut collection of poems rages against numerous
oppressive systems while highlighting the often-unspoken traumas of female
experience, composing poems as journal entries, adn questioning her own
behaviour as much as she shines a spotlight on the behaviour of others. Through
nine poem-sections—“Statement of Poetics,” “Young Love in the Post-Activism
Era,” “Young Feminists in the Archive Era,” “Emotion of Hope,” “The Orange
Toxic Event,” “The Suicidal Revolutionaries, Or God Bless Kathy Acker” “Haibun
Dribs and Drabs / Scars and Scabs,” “Fire Poems I” and “Fire Poems II”—McIsaac
composes a series and sequence of prose poems that accumulate to form short
essays on experience, trauma, dismissal, resistance and methods of survival.
Hers
is a poetry that focuses her attention on forms of power that work to reduce or
dismiss the contributions of women, from theory to patriarchy to literary
writing to cultural influences to more intimate interactions. For all the rage
that rages throughout, there is an enormous amount of play going on in the
writing itself, exploring structures of the lyric sentence, prose poems and the
haibun, allowing repetition and rhythm and the effects of sound to showcase her
enviable ability to strike and parry, twist and sing at even the highest
volume. She writes: “Is this the end of irony? / The moment that I have been
waiting for?” See my full review here.
