Heather Cadsby is one of those rare Canadian poets shoring a well-honed and generous sense of humour against the hard edge of grief and loss. She acknowledges the limitations of humour while at the same time giving room to its enormous capacity for relief and pleasure (as well as poetic accomplishment). The odd angle is sometimes just what’s needed to push through the oncoming currents. Don Domanski, who blurbs Heather Cadsby’s fourth collection of poetry, Could be, released a pack of metaphorical dogs into his last book, All Our Wonder Unavenged. Now consider the recurring animal-embodiment of the Cadsby aesthetic: the duck.
She worries over them (“Bridge Over Mimico Creek”):
A boy was throwing pieces of bread
at the ducks. I said, “Excuse me but
that is killing them.” He turned and
said, “Lady, these ain’t stones.”
She interrogates them (“Why always me”):
What are those ducks doing
peering up at me like that?
She chastises for their quick, sharp quacks (“He has a book on the wall”):
He too has the autodidact’s arrogance.
That book is Mimico Creek music
of which we could’ve been the Paul Simon
instead of these one-note ducks.
Threnody for the quacks.
This mixture of love for and frustration with the duck is not incongruous with the kind of love and frustration that the speakers of these poems feel toward their own experiences and toward the voices these experiences set chattering in their heads. The backdrop of Could be is one of loss: the loss of a mother, the loss of a husband, miscarriages, the loss of a creek to industrialization, the loss of lives during 9’11. The spine of this collection is a series of aubades, literally songs or poems about lovers separating at dawn. Cadsby, for the most part, draws this loss out from her own skullscape and into the public sphere, stating in one poem: “If it’s too private, it’s unreliable.” She brings her grief over these losses to bear upon the peculiarities and quick turns of daily contact with other people. The best moments of the book occur when the private and public find a way to dance with each other:
Give me rage.
Not this dull torpor,
this weary body moving down the aisle of pet foods.
I have no cat, no dog, no bird.
The rest of “Single woman on the death of her mother” is fraught with the kind of obsessive interiority that Cadsby questions in the previously quoted phrase. When she pushes her cart down the aisles of the world, that’s when the collection really gets interesting. Many of the collection’s best poems—“Man walking his dog,” “Would you like to have a poem, I know I would,” and “Bridge Over Mimico Creek”—are ones in which the speaker is engaged in conversation with another person, real or imagined. In these poems she documents lapses in communication, sudden divulgements and changes in tone with the skill of a master dramatist. This interplay brings forth some of the book’s most revelatory lines:
A dog barked Blue Skies two times.
It was a semiotic moment you said. Then you said
actually more ’pataphysical.And to let myself in I said Meta Meta
Met a man with seven wives. But you
were daydreaming about some girl. I knew
you didn’t hear me. Ears are too close to the brain.
One could nit-pick over some of the line-breaks here, but I find myself too busy keeping up with the quick pitch and prodding intelligence of the voice. Could be is full of quotable passages like this one, leaping beyond guffaws, beyond weirdness for its own sake, and casting new light on the human condition the way only the sharpest wits can. Even Cadsby’s speakers get caught up in their own acrobatics. Some of the poems have difficulty landing on their feet, ending with an interrogative or simply “[taking] off in a huff.” “And here I am going out on a limb, doing it all” she says in “Why always me.” This sort of self-consciousness bogs down some of the poems: “Whooee,” she says at the end of “!!!!!” “what a ride, this full-tilt posturing!” A reader could revel in this pure glibness a little more if Cadsby hadn’t so successfully exposed the dark, grieving underbelly of so many other poems. When outwardly focused, Cadsby is ready for anything to “land on and muse Me.” When turning inward she occasionally risks self-recrimination:
Right now I’m not trying to sing.
It just comes out like that.
Humming over every errand
so you avoid the wholehearted effort
and sidestep to now and lose
yourself in never wanting to really know.
But “Could be” this sort of admonishment is an intrinsic part of the wholehearted effort the speaker fears she avoids. This is a fabulous book. Readers should check it out.
