Chad Pelley at Salty Ink writes about former Halifax poet laureate Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s new collection Lost Gospels – “A truly moving collection of poetry that dwells in profoundly personal yet and universal subject matter. A book a blaze so you feel it. Outspoken and insightful, there is a way she conducts her language so you hear all the right nuances. So the sharp lines sink in. Deeply.”

For the full review, see  http://saltyink.com/2010/07/22/salty-ink-on-poet-laureate-lorri-neilsen-glenns-new-collection-lost-gospels/

Lorri will be part of the Shelburne Writers Festival in Shelburne, Nova Scotia on August 13-14, 2010 with authors George Elliott Clarke, Beth Powning and Stephanie Domet.  Here’s the website for that http://www.ospreyartscentre.com/writers_fest10.htm – Lorri will conduct a writing workshop “Poetry and the Art of Letting Go” and will read with George Elliott Clarke.

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.

Inkslinger at The Overdecorated Bookcase writes: “I’ve had affection and respect for Steve McOrmond’s poetry since Lean Days … so it was with much anticipation that I opened the pages of his latest collection The Good News About Armageddon.  And I wasn’t disappointed.”

For the full review, go to http://paintedbookcase.blogspot.com/

http://indextrious.blogspot.com/2010/06/lost-gospels.html – I received this volume of poetry from the publisher, Brick Books (thanks, BB!) What a treat it was. I hadn’t heard of this poet previously, too bad for me, as this was a wonderful read.

Lost Gospels / Lorri Neilsen Glenn
London, ON: Brick Books, c2010.
112 p.

Lorri Neilsen Glenn has one attribute that automatically made me want to read her work. She is from the Prairies. And, something that will interest many of you, in her day job she researches literacy. She was the Poet Laureate of Halifax (where she lives now) from 2005-2009.

All this to say that this is a marvellous collection well worth anyone’s reading time. It is divided into sections, each containing a few poems, or a longer cycle. The central section is called “Songs for Simone” and is addressed to French philosopher Simone Weil. It is a fascinating approach. Each of the poems takes a moment or a physical object — lilies, history, war, trees, cemeteries, a dress — and makes it into a deep, meaning-filled image. I found them all moving, in different ways. Glenn’s facility with language and with all the other poems, songs, philosophies she refers to in her work make each piece resound with deep currents of meaning. The title of the whole work, Lost Gospels, reflects the intersection of history, nature and philosophy as Glenn reveals the divinity in human life and our natural world. Looking back at her childhood and at images of both numinous beauty and existential despair, as well as her interplay with the words of the mystic Simone Weil, show an interest in the place of God, of spirituality itself, in our lives and human existence itself.

I read this volume bit by bit, one section at a time, and went back to reread them out of sequence once I’d read the entire book. I can’t explain why it gripped me so intensely, but I do know that I felt all these poems, understood and was moved by the images and the language. The natural world plays a large part in this work, and perhaps that is what resonated deeply with me. I will share one of the poems from the section entitled “Just So You Know” (by permission of the author & publisher) — I loved this one so much that I have copied it out to pin up above my desk. So here is “Dusk”, by Lorri Neilsen Glenn, from the highly recommended collection Lost Gospels.

Dusk

is such a ragged time. The shirred day loosened from the line we strung
across the reach of morning, when a bird called out its signature, its signature,
and we opened to the hours ahead, settling in to carve again a pure
clear shape around each thought and plan, an offering, a duty done,
a passage read, or one more step or image caught or lesson learned or heart
set right, but sundown pulls along its arc the last descending string of light,
leaves us with minutes in our hands, frayed recollections, wild release,
the folly of ambitious plans we trade for rest and abject peace.

I would like to begin my talk this evening with a quote from John Barton, taken from rob mclennan’s very useful 12 or 20 questions, online.

“For me the best poems evince a way of being that it is their place to record and preserve.”

John Barton was born in Edmonton in 1957, raised in Calgary, and educated at the Universities of Alberta, Calgary, Quebec, and Victoria, where he studied with Robin Skelton.

Here’s what the poet and editor Harold Rhenisch says about John in those early days:

“John used to live in this funky Mediterranean apartment off of View Street. It’s now a car lot.  He always was a love poet. Then Sono Nis brought out his first book, with the worst book cover in the history of publishing.

After that, he found his true gift as a deconstructivist and reconstructivist of the body. Enough of exploring that territory as a romantic landscape. That cover, I think, would have cured anyone of that.
Still a love poet, though.

I remember workshops in which Robin Skelton gave John some very specific advice about depictions and embodiments of love in poetry, which sounded like part of an ongoing private conversation only conducted between the two of them. The public and the private, in conversation with each other.

That’s Robin, for sure.

And John.

John was always great at surrounding himself with people and building small communities of interest and support.

I remember workshops in his Santorinian Villa on View, with a coffee table, and mushroom and broccolli chunks, with ranch dip.

A totally new cuisine for one boy from the mountains. Not to mention the workshops. Whoa.

Sitting there inside the poem John made of Victoria. Or inside one intersection of its many lines.

John lived his poetry. Looking back on it, I’d say he likely had many rich and intimate private lives that intersected in moments of poetry, which he shared.

He kept pestering me to write reviews, starting with Gustafson. He knew something about me I didn’t know.

Took me years to catch up to his insight.

The world is his poem.

As an eminently literary act”

And the poet Patricia Young remembers John, too, from those days. She says:

“I didn’t know John well back then, it’s all a blur actually, life in general as well as the poetry workshop we shared though I do remember Robin Skelton assigning certain things to individuals, and one week he asked (told?) John to write a poem without any adjectives and adverbs (was John’s poetry rich in adjectives and adverbs? I wasn’t aware of it but perhaps Robin was), and the following week John brought to class a poem that quite blew me away. I can’t remember a single word of the poem but when I read it, I realized John was a ”real” poet. As for the rest of us we were still cruising, playing, trying to be “real” poets. Somehow, Robin had forced John to pare his language down to the essentials, and there it was, a genuine poem! Thrilling. John may not remember this or remember it differently. It was 30 years ago so I’m willing to believe anything is true or isn’t true, did or did not happen.”

And Neile Graham, a Canadian poet based in Seattle adds these thoughts:

“I have memories of being in workshops with him all those years ago and seeing his promise even then–Emily Carr poems in particular knocked me out. It was clear from the start (I met John in a third-year poetry workshop with Robin Skelton) that John would have an ongoing career. Our fourth-year workshop together in 1979-1980 especially was a watershed of amazing writers, among whom John shone. Robin Skelton recognized his talent right away and encouraged John’s thought, wit and style, and published A Poor Photographer very early in John’s career. We’ve been ongoing friends, sharing both the literary and personal details of our lives ever since. John has been a generous literary advisor and supporter of my work and an inspiration as well. We’ve taken wonderful short trips together (along with my husband, American poet James Gurley) for mini writing retreats on the coast where we write and share our work. Some of the most pleasant memories of my life are of being with Jim and John at La Push and Rialto Beach talking about poems. Perhaps the most frenetic are of visiting him in New York City, where he attended Columbia’s MFA program for a term (he dropped out to take a Canada Council grant to complete his Emily Carr book). We had a crazy time exploring the city’s bookstores and museums. I have a wonderful iconic photograph of John in a bellboy’s hat at the party at my parents’ house after Jim’s and my wedding. He’s standing on the balcony having just sent a celebratory champagne cork out in the darkness looking stylish, smart, fond, and amusing, all of which have been apparent throughout his writing career. His work is deeply crafted, intelligent, humane, and also quietly witty.”

John lived for many years in Ottawa, where he worked as an editor for Vernissage – the Magazine of the National Gallery of Canada, first as production manager and then as Editor in Chief. At the same time, he was assistant editor and then co-editor of Arc – Canada’s National Poetry Magazine. He currently lives in Victoria, where he edits what many consider one of the finest literary magazines in Canada, the Malahat Review.

Between 1981 and 2009, John has published nine collections of poetry, and this brings us to our true subject this evening, his most recent collection, Hymn.

Let us begin by judging this book by its cover. The mixed media “Three Boys” is by Attila Richard Lukacs, the artist also chosen for the cover art of Seminal – The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets, co-edited by John and Billeh Nickerson in 2007. Lukacs is widely known for his very strong representations of male sexuality, yet this picture has a tenderness and perhaps a sense of shared grief that gently draws the reader in. So let us enter.

Barry Dempster had this to say about editing the manuscript of Hymn with John:

“The editing process concentrated on small things in what ultimately was a very big picture.   Both John and I were willing to suffer the details for the good of the overall book.   John was a pleasure to work with, tackling each and every comment, often coming up with new ideas rather than simply moving text around.   I know the book was important to John not just as evidence of his ongoing maturity as a writer, but for both the personal and political ramifications of writing so honestly and richly from a gay male perspective.   If I remember correctly, the ordering remained pretty much the way John had planned it, although we did remove a few poems that weren’t working at the same caliber as the others.”

When asked in the 12 or 20 questions blog, “How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?” John answered: “It is technically more adventurous than anything I have written so far.”

The book is divided into five distinct sections, and I will approach each section and each poem in turn.

Part I, Aide-Memoire, is one poem which requires us to turn the book sideways, an interesting twist and play with its subject-matter, I think: a “catalogue of sexual encounters” as the review in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix describes it. How explicit and unswerving to start a poetry collection in this way! It’s certainly an attention grabber.

Part II, Ideograms, is made up of 21 lyric poems. An ideogram, according to the OED, is “a character symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sequence of sounds in its name,” for example a numeral, or a Chinese character. There is a repetition of certain images here such as fingers, keys, the hands that manipulate the flying of kites, the playing of a piano  – and the introduction of the speaker’s father, a major figure in several of the poems, to whose memory the collection is dedicated.

“Ideogram, in the Half Light” introduces the notion of ‘the courage to love’ as well as the physical details of fingers to lips, attempts at communication through sleep, and silence.

“Free Associations”– dedicated to the great language poet Erîn Moure, who — like John – was raised in the West — continues the notion of a stuttering conversation, the way words and minds connect and then disconnect, raises the subject of self/editing, and personal history through geographical links – ‘this unnecessary / highway, its denuded story I am // destined to wear / all my life.”

“Geology of the Body” continues the personal history, the connection to geography, and in 12 or 20 John says: “I suspect that anyone who knows my poetry would feel that I evince a strong connection to geography, but I would prefer to say that I am shaped by geographies. I believe landscape imprints itself upon us from an early age—Highway 1A west from Calgary is my true primordial landscape—”

“Persona” sets the speaker in motion, clearly present as the driver here, moving through the landscape of his life. He identifies his companion at the start of the poem as “my friend/ my stranger” but by the end, the stranger becomes “a fellow //ventriloquist, illusive / member of the choir, you //hitched this  / ride with me”

Here I would like to pause and take note of John’s marvelous use of line breaks throughout this collection, as I will remark throughout this talk, and as evinced here in the weight and double entendre it brings to specific phrases.

“Shopping at Capers” brings the journey to the west coast, gloriously abundant and joyful:  “distillate lakes / of the heart laid bare, yes // and yes,” — the second half of this poem is distinctly sexual in tone and yet still a geographical exploration.

The climactic follow-up to that, “Hallelujah”, takes this fruit and travel experience to its apex.

“Inwards” is a slowing down, a still life, bringing into focus these lines:

“not because love incinerates the brain / with a radiance of flowers burning. No it opens inwards  / the path ahead sentinel as lit wisdom seen from far off.”

“Pathetic Fallacy” is filled with some of the finest examples of word play in the book, set in a poem where the garden itself is a sexual playground of metaphor. I note lines like “pathetic fallacy a trope for our phallocentrism” or “feyly manicured blooms in contrast to my hardy // weediness, desire’s other phylum”. The poem settles again into the question of the usefulness of language, and the notion of letting words do what they will, as in the final line, italicized, “leaving the language to be”.

“Le Tombeau de Sylvia Plath” is one of my favourite poems in the collection, and I would like to read it aloud now.

_________________________________________________________

LE TOMBEAU DE SYLVIA PLATH

How long have we stood here gazing blankly into the muddy yellow
Yorkshire clay where against your wishes you have lain, a citizen

of your own century even in death, with nothing much left beyond
a loosening paradigm of bones to claim you with, fugitive wisps
of blonde hair or an effaced piece of heirloom jewelry a cousin might
recollect, a watch stopped not long after no one could hear it stop.

There are strangers who come here who cannot shake the apparition
of you faintly smiling, perfection betrayed if satisfied, a smile they try on

in the mirror before leaving for the graveyard with narcissus, perhaps tulips
or poppies—your studied  moods symbolized—to stand and conjecture
over that other grave, the words, tease your last breaths from them only
as they can be surmised, head poised in the oven on an ironed napkin

at 23 Fitzroy Road, Yeats’ subdivided house the perfect dark address
you had hoped to fortify with wine and laughter to give you strength

poetry a gas jet you woke up to one morning in February, as always
but finally could not light, lungs filling with an inspiration so terrible
you would not write it out, the only accolade you could welcome
was its odorless embrace hello, goodbye. How we keep reviving

the body of your work to enjoy an unstable place in our book-lined lives
keep taking it down from the shelf, trained by our literate scruples only.

You have fallen a long way, you were right, and not into the rocky earth
of your beloved Devon among the anchoring roots of a familiar yew tree
as you had hoped, to be sheltered from a weather you need no longer feel.
Instead you lie far from home, far from Massachusetts and the woman

you have become, no less hallowed than stone men exhumed from bogs
in Europe, their agonies tested, the facts suggested by the unspeakable

mouths and strangely passionate eyes hollowed by silt. Be glad of your final
loss of consciousness, a nightmare without ears the living are loathe to ride.
I wait by your grave in the rain, firmly in the footsteps of all the others who want
to commune with the dead for no reason, yellow clay encumbering my shoes.

I have even brought you roses, the adulterous buds affecting to be full-blown.
I wanted to believe in tenderness, but our age is not tender; there is no tender age.

_________________________________________________________

I am particularly moved by the final lines which had the affect of raising the hair on my arms when I first read them. This always has seemed to me to be the mark of highest art.  I have brought with me today several pictures of the gravestone in Heptonstall Churchyard in Yorkshire. These pictures were sent to me coincidentally two weeks ago by a former student who lives in London.

“Installation in Homage to Gathie Falk” is a marvelous combination of a homage and a didactic poem – here we manage to literally walk in the shoes of the oppressed, as well as in this case those on strike at the National Gallery. Gathie Falk (whose installation pieces might well have been on display inside the gallery at the time) is a visual and performance artist known for making of the banal something extraordinary, and John has echoed that skill in this poem.

“Foul Bay at 2 a.m.” again does what Gathie Falk might: it makes the commonplace beautiful in a snapshot of sight and sound, a visual image capturing work and beauty.

“Anxiety” seems to incorporate confessional elements both transformed and not, (I especially noted the lines “Every window / THAT window” here) – this double reality becomes a state which feeds anxiety, accentuated by the coming of winter. The possibility of war enters the collection for the first time in this poem – War is a theme and a subject explored in Hymn in various and affecting ways.

In the poem “Frieze” the form is markedly shattered and I wondered if this was a consequence of conflict. Here the body “loses / grasp of its vocabulary” – language fails.

“Aquarium” suggests the human state of loneliness and distance from the natural world, the earth itself (see lines such as ‘in the high rises where we sleep’), so far removed from the watery world of our beginnings and the communal nature of our longings.

“Saumon Fumée” made me laugh aloud in recognition of my habit to correct misspellings and poor punctuation on public signage. How many of us here are born editors, I wonder? Here the poet reflects those moments, and turns the ’smocked salmon’ into something far more angular and even fearful. Again, the image of wounded lovers appears.

“On Evia” is an exploration of a landscape very different than the other poems in this section. Evia is the second largest Greek island after Crete, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel, and the site of several historical battles throughout history.  The speaker’s distance and perhaps isolation moves into different areas with this geographic shift.

“This Land is Our Land” humorously moves back to the ‘known’ landscape, home and desire. Feeding the pleasure of the flesh on several levels, the speaker here appears to feel comfortable in their skin.

“Runoff” is the final poem in this Ideograms section. It returns us to the Alberta landscape of the speaker’s childhood and picks up several images from earlier poems, ending with a mixture of language, indigenous plantings and finally a sense of safety in which “we land downstream from the syllabic overflow”.

The third section of Hymn is entitled Narrations, and consists of five prose poems written without the use of periods, broken by commas and dashes.

The first poem, “In the House of the Present”, is to my view a dream sequence, and seems to refer to a childhood friendship, family memories, the past, things lost and let go, yet neither a sense of grief nor anxiety exist here.

The second poem, “Strata” is a particularly complex, fascinating poem, both in its stratified form and content. Simplistically described, the speaker is watching the film “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, made in 1959 and starring James Mason and, rather absurdly, Pat Boone in a supporting role.  While watching the film, the speaker is eating fresh peaches. His father is revealed to be suffering from a war wound  – war enters the collection here very directly, overshadowing much of the poem.

In the second section, fruit and love are paralleled, and the marvelous line “Too many of us afraid to crack open our closed hearts” appears – very much a theme in the book to my view.

“The man with the blank face is the man I love” signals the hidden secrets between generations, between loved ones — after all, the result of cracking open the heart is often heartbreak.

“Sombrio Beach”, the third poem in this section, made me ask this question: what is the grief here directed at? Looking back through these three poems it would appear to reflect the dying of the older generation, and perhaps also of a lover: on p. 67, I noted the lines “the blank man I still love would far too soon cull and halve his life”.

“The Troubles” takes us to Ireland, and to the Falls Road where the troubles hit hard. It also reveals the speaker’s family history, the immigration to Upper Canada, the house on Amherst Island near Kingston, and finally the haven of the Republic of Ireland mixed with the terror/ism of love.

The fifth and final prose poem in this section is entitled “Asymmetries.” It is set in Barcelona, and although the poem masquerades as a simple travel narrative it becomes a poem about indifference and deformity, uncaring, male beauty, the sense of history held in the body through time and travel which is perhaps the over-arching theme of the whole section.

Part V of the collection is entitled “Hymns” and the poems here are in two-line stanzas throughout.

“Excerpt from a Travel Journal” contains the lines that sum the section up for me:

‘So here we are, men who travel / in disguises we trade amongst ourselves, comedians in the same desire’.  Desire is central to this section which contains by far the most erotic poems of this collection.

“Eros” (with apologies to John Le Carré) presents the alter-ego, the hidden self, the erotic side of the speaker’s nature, hidden, only glimpsed, and coming in from the cold.

“Him” is the only poem from this collection chosen for the important anthology Seminal. Although based on a painting it would appear to me to depict the death of the speaker’s father, without sentimentality, in the clear and detailed light of day.

“10 lines for X” is the only poem in this collection that plays so broadly with language and form, using numbers in a very light-hearted manner. If only texting were this clever.

“Way Finding” is set in a house under renovation with the background noise from CNN news. The poem itself has the result of leaving the reader discomfited – ill at ease and restless, the state of the speaker’s world made real and tangible.

In sharp contrast to the intimacy and quiet of the previous poem, “Fucking the Minotaur” takes us into the glare of the bathhouse, a reality described in details reminiscent of a labyrinthine hunger journey, and brings to mind a friend telling me once that taking leave of the bathhouse he often felt more lonely than when he had entered.

“Man of your Dreams” subverts the fantasy, takes an imaginative leap into possibility, both satisfying and not – again, the sense of failure, of a character unrevealed, a life unlived is present in lines such as “a man without qualities” which seems to describe the speaker here rather than one who is observed.

“Our Embrace – Random Etudes, 1 through 4″ begins with a quote from the iconic Quentin Crisp: “sex is the last refuge of the miserable”, which could in large part be applied to this section as a whole.

Part 1, Pastorale, describes “a ravine mulched with waste and tangled fallen / branches falling towards an unseen river”, not one’s average pastoral setting for an attempted kiss, and the one being kissed states “if I were to believe in love”; in other words, the romance not yet begun is doomed.

Part 2, Divertissement, presents sex without affection, sentiment or caring, a pure diversion, a form of refuge.

Part 3, Pastiche, turns the oft-quoted Atwood poem into not so different areas of disturbing realities, nothing to do with cracking open the heart.

Part 4, Caprice, contains the missing kiss of earlier sections, yet causes the reader to see stars because of it, with the gorgeous wordplay of gilt / stale/mated by guile and artifice.

In the next poem, “Warhol”, gorgeous wordplay continues in this multi-layered semi-narrative. Lines like “I project myself across the ready-made screen of your fame, ejaculator // in home slow-mo, a low-fidelity money shot so orchidaceous you organza — a deadly improvisation you exteriorize stroke-free over my cropped-out face.” Who else writes about sex like this? Fantastic stuff!

Following this rococo over-the-top poem, the choice of “Portal” to follow is a marked leap. There is such openness and warmth here, such a clear-eyed view of humanity. It feels somehow deeply personal and invested with history and memory. I will read it now.

_______________________________________________________

PORTAL

Drop the bombs, I say, drop the bombs, stand inside the portal
with your mother and hold your breath, your left hand in hers

while the house begins to shake, Ghats of the Indian Air Force
cutting low across the border, an escort to the French-built

Mystères about to strafe the airfield outside Multan, ancient city
of your distant childhood in Pakistan, but you are too young

to know the Sabres stationed nearby take flight too late to block
the raid, holding your mother=s hand while dishes in the cabinets

clatter, the door jamb fixed above your head square and tense
as your shoulders, my hands smoothing, loosening the restrained

muscles of your back as you start to talk, drop the bombs, I say
drop the bombs, your heart opening, ten years in Canada, amazed

no one before me had ever asked, the first of your wars decades past
eyes askance, right hand grabbing mine in vestigial panic, no answer

when you call Karachi, Ramadan over, your parents at the mosque
the moon’s crescent scything a quick, bright swath through the stars

as it arcs inexorably towards us across the unseeming turbulence
of the Earth, meteors raining down timeless windfall, an ice storm

we watch approach from the east, standing on your balcony, the last
Boeing 767 to lift away from the airport banking overhead, the Arctic

air close about us while, breathless, you long to take flight, not from me
or the knowledge of who you are, but from the peaceable coldness

of the north—no one way to pilot this shifting jet stream even your mother
might, fast or feast, hope is love—drop the bombs, I say, drop the bombs

hold my hand or let it go, neither of us either stateless or desperados
these words a portal without imprimatur to grant you safe passage.

_______________________________________________________

The title of “A Boys’ Own, with Queen” would lead one to imagine the poem’s content as very different than what’s here: perhaps touched by rock and roll and early death, but instead, the Queen is the long-lived Victoria, and the poem is set in a converted one room schoolhouse. Surprise, surprise.

“Sandy Hill Gothic” is another poem about settling down, calming, becoming a householder, perhaps housebound, the poet and the healer, in harmony. It is a calmer poem than most others in this section, centered in domesticity and peace.

“Hymn”, the title poem of the collection (though it could also be seen as “Him”) projects a story of a break-up that somehow becomes celebratory by the close of the poem. It is an uplifting hymn of praise to possibility.

In “Amnesia” we return to Greece, and specifically to a barber’s chair in Athens where a barber from Delphi plies his trade. The speaker observes a boy who reminds the speaker of his own youth, “the boy not yet shattered / by love”. The realities of aging projected at the end of this poem by the loss of hair in the barber’s chair is in a sense both a reminiscence and a case of amnesia in combination, the way memory and time make a tumble of our emotions as the world and life fly by.

“Days of 2004, Days of Cavafy” allows us to again turn the book sideways, as we did at the start. Honouring and recalling two famous gay writers (Forster more closeted than Cavafy, though they shared a friendship, deep admiration and long correspondence – Forster’s memoir of Cavafy is contained in his 1922 travel journal, “Alexandria – a History and Guide”).  Cavafy’s sensual poetry, much like some of the poems in this collection, are filled with lyricism and emotion, and inspired by recollection and remembrance.

The poem is voiced by a man no longer young, in a society not entirely welcoming of sexual freedoms, in a city not as cosmopolitan as one might wish. It speaks again of loneliness, of a life apart, hesitations and wishes, with a clear-eyed view of reality, of where we are now, poor humans, reaching out to strangers for aid and comfort.

“The Afterlife” is, fittingly, the final poem of the section. It is perhaps a fantasy written after prolonged illness or pain, in which the speaker imagines his afterlife and those who read his obituary, those whose ‘tongue’ is foreign in the capital city of this land.

The fifth and final section of the book is made up of one poem, entitled “Polygonics.” The definition of a polygon is a plane figure with many sides and angles, a geometric description, perhaps, of a human. This poem again displays John’s marked use of line breaks, for instance “guessing afterwards at wrecks we are // sure must lie deeper still”. But beyond the word play and light humour there is a final sense of hope and possibility present in this poem, the “you & I” incorporating all the past, and all the “possible trajectories of the limitless”.

It is an uplifting ending, set in a different unnamed town, on the breakwater, where the speaker asks a companion to overcome their fear and “walk with me.”

Here is a letter I received from poet and civil servant Blaine Marchand in which he speaks of John, his long-time close friend.

“The one thing that struck me about John when I first met him in 1987 – at an Ottawa Poetry Group meeting organized by Christopher Levenson, was his determination which was somewhat at variance with his thin and waif like appearance. Back then, he was fresh out of library school at the UofWO. But he was clear that this new job in Ottawa was simply to pay off his student loan. His real dream, at some point in the near future he stressed over and over again, was to be a full-time writer. From that first day in Ottawa he worked toward his dream. He began to lay the groundwork as a poet – working on the editorial board of Arc Poetry Magazine and eventually becoming its editor. He had such insight in how to improve this little literary magazine so it would become the professional national magazine it is today. He found inventive ways to make it more appealing. He added work by visual artists. He devoted issues to themes. He set up a poetry contest.  Sometimes he chose to do things that were provocative, such as an issue called “We All Begin in Little Magazines.” But with each new step, the circulation of the magazine grew.

He also pursued this dream by changing his professional career. He left working in the library of the National Aviation Museum to work on the periodicals at the National Gallery of Canada so he could continue to gain first-hand deeper insight and fuller experience in the full range of production values of government publications – from their concept, through their layout, to their final printing. Here too, he was inventive.

It was interesting to watch his creative and artistic vision for magazines take shape both professionally and creatively. It was as if he was a train heading toward his longed-for destination.

Leaving a well-paid (or reasonably paid) government job with its benefits and its pension is a daring move. It is not for the faint of heart. But then John’s heart was never faint. He pulled up stakes, moving to the West Coast (something else he dreamed of since he had graduated from the University of Victoria’s Creative Writing Program) and became the editor of The Malahat, the creation of one of his mentor’s – Robin Skelton.

Once when John and I were attending the League of Canadian Poets annual general meeting in Victoria, we went to visit his father and stepmother. His father pleaded with John that he should finally go through the numerous boxes in the garage. These cartons stored decades of John’s things from his childhood and his university years. I helped John with this task. In one box, I came across a notebook he had written in 1967 when his family had gone across Canada to Montreal to visit Expo 67.

As I read through this childhood stories, I was amazed to see how many of the ideas and themes John continues to explore today, were found there in those pages – the struggle to understand what constitutes a family, a long list of food items consumed on the cross-country trek, and the struggle to find his place, to be loved.

Over the years, John has grown in maturity as a poet. With this has come a voice willing to speak out about his family. His poems struggle with questioning and with the acceptance of weaknesses and new insights into previously unnoticed strengths. These are poems about innate, flawed humanness that all families share. But as the poetic voice grew surer and he grew more daring in his poetic vision, he discovered family is not restricted just to parents and siblings. It reaches beyond them, drawing in those we love along the way, friends, strangers and mere acquaintances, who share something beyond blood, a sexual orientation, a distinctive commonality.

But as with our parents and siblings, this community is also human and exhibits its own neuroses and issues. One thing that has consistently struck me about John’s poems is that many of them are post-coital. After the initial rush of love, of lust, of sensual pleasure, the real difficulties begin and so the creative impulse – the struggle to articulate what is felt deep in our bodies, how it rarely matches what is in our hearts, and that in the end, we all must come to accept, that human love can be fleeting, can be intense but it is never as romantic as we are led to believe it is or that we want it to be.

John’s years in the Creative Writing Program were years in which John and his fellow students, many of them nationally known poets today, were formative ones for him. He always spoke with high esteem of the professors who taught him. Today, he is playing the same way, not only by nurturing beginning poets in The Malahat, but working as an editor on many poetry books (and, as he is with himself as a poet, he can be very demanding in that role) and by being writer-in-residence where he is helping writers to learn to hear their own voices and to write them out. I have no doubt that there is a good deal of cross-fertilization going on too. John has always been open to learning from new trends, new ideas and incorporating them into his own work, but making them distinctly his own.”

And the last words go to the poet Neile Graham, who goes on to says this about Hymn:

“I think Hymn is the crowning achievement of [John's] career so far and I confess I have been somewhat surprised that it has as yet received so little recognition. It’s powerful, mature work of a level rarely seen and I’m starting to think that people are intimidated by it. At least, that’s the only explanation I can think of that more people aren’t talking about it, thinking about it, and writing about it. John, his writing, and his long service to Canadian writing as readings coordinator and editor, deserve far more accolades than they have received thus far.”

I can only enthusiastically agree.

Carolyn Smart

Vancouver poet laureate Brad Cran writes, “[Antony] Di Nardo is a superb poet. Alien, Correspondent is a great book… a diligently crafted and unpretentious book filled with insight and great poem after great poem.”

For the full article, see http://bradcran.com/vancouver_verse/alien-correspondent/

http://indextrious.blogspot.com/2010/03/international-womens-day-celebration-in.html – Happy International Women’s Day! Hope all of you had a great day and celebrated in some way.

For my part, I read this wonderful collection of poetry:
Hooked / Carolyn Smart
London, ON: Brick Books, c2009.
120 p.

This collection is made up of 7 monologues, all recreating or reinhabiting women who struggled with life, artistically, mentally, morally. As the author says, she was interested in them because “All the women are addictive personalities: Myra is addicted to murder, Unity is addicted to Hitler, several are addicted to alcohol and drugs, some are addicted to love itself. I think there is a hook in everyone, somewhere“. They are women who were all born previous to World War II and spent their lives in that stretch of the 20th Century that brought so much change into women’s places in our world. Some are artists, some were women who held a place in the public imagination for unpleasant reasons. The seven women are: Myra Hindley, Unity Mitford, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Carrington, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, and Elizabeth Smart.

Each poem sequence talks about their lives, how they developed into the person they were known for, and then takes us to the end of their lives as well. Some parts are disturbing, some heart wrenching. Even with the obvious repulsion involved in reading about someone like Myra Hindley, Smart manages to capture our attention and fascinate. I read each section separately over the last week or two, and found it a good way to really get a picture of the women she is portraying. One thing I found appealing is that is about women who can not be idealized or romanticized. Some of them are repugnant, some simply unpleasant, but there is no sentimental adoration of women just for being women. Their lives are clearly apprehended as complex and they have no special dispensation of grace simply by the fact of being female.

The format is also quite accessible. It is easily read because of its narrative style; if you like biography in poetic form this one may appeal. If you haven’t read a lot of poetry but want to start, this would be a good beginning – the story line of each section makes the poems very comprehensible.

They’ve come up with an ingenious way to share these poems as well, Hooked In House, in which one actress, Nicky Guadagni, shares bits from each monologue while you eat and move from room to room to hear from the different women Smart inhabits here. That sounds like an amazing experience, though I think it would be a little chilling to listen to the Myra Hindley voice, in particular.

If you’d like to hear Carolyn Smart reading from this collection herself, here is a video to take a listen to.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izpmC0YEclw

**NB – I should add that I received this copy from Brick Books (thanks!!) and that they are having a huge 35th Anniversary Sale until the end of April! Go check it out.

Thanks to The Indextrious Reader – notes and quotes from a literary librarian

http://indextrious.blogspot.com/2010/03/international-womens-day-celebration-in.html

http://indextrious.blogspot.com/2010/03/international-womens-day-celebration-in.html

Happy International Women’s Day! Hope all of you had a great day and celebrated in some way.

For my part, I read this wonderful collection of poetry:
Hooked / Carolyn Smart
London, ON: Brick Books, c2009.
120 p.

This collection is made up of 7 monologues, all recreating or reinhabiting women who struggled with life, artistically, mentally, morally. As the author says, she was interested in them because “All the women are addictive personalities: Myra is addicted to murder, Unity is addicted to Hitler, several are addicted to alcohol and drugs, some are addicted to love itself. I think there is a hook in everyone, somewhere“. They are women who were all born previous to World War II and spent their lives in that stretch of the 20th Century that brought so much change into women’s places in our world. Some are artists, some were women who held a place in the public imagination for unpleasant reasons. The seven women are: Myra Hindley, Unity Mitford, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Carrington, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, and Elizabeth Smart.

Each poem sequence talks about their lives, how they developed into the person they were known for, and then takes us to the end of their lives as well. Some parts are disturbing, some heart wrenching. Even with the obvious repulsion involved in reading about someone like Myra Hindley, Smart manages to capture our attention and fascinate. I read each section separately over the last week or two, and found it a good way to really get a picture of the women she is portraying. One thing I found appealing is that is about women who can not be idealized or romanticized. Some of them are repugnant, some simply unpleasant, but there is no sentimental adoration of women just for being women. Their lives are clearly apprehended as complex and they have no special dispensation of grace simply by the fact of being female.

The format is also quite accessible. It is easily read because of its narrative style; if you like biography in poetic form this one may appeal. If you haven’t read a lot of poetry but want to start, this would be a good beginning – the story line of each section makes the poems very comprehensible.

They’ve come up with an ingenious way to share these poems as well, Hooked In House, in which one actress, Nicky Guadagni, shares bits from each monologue while you eat and move from room to room to hear from the different women Smart inhabits here. That sounds like an amazing experience, though I think it would be a little chilling to listen to the Myra Hindley voice, in particular.

If you’d like to hear Carolyn Smart reading from this collection herself, here is a video to take a listen to.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izpmC0YEclw

**NB – I should add that I received this copy from Brick Books (thanks!!) and that they are having a huge 35th Anniversary Sale until the end of April! Go check it out.

At the very heart of what I love about poetry is its attempts to capture in a truly authentic way how we make sense of our lives. Primarily as I see it, this involves issues of identity, experience, and consciousness with our imaginations being the fulcrum the rest of these mental processes rest on in a good poem.

For me, I like poems that mediate between one’s empirical experience of what is real and one’s awareness of a self at one remove, a self that processes all thoughts and emotions through the imagination. Whether you view the imagination as the mind’s holy ghost, a faint whisper of word and image, or more cynically, as cognitive feedback produced in the brain due to overloaded sensory equipment, the imagination teaches us how to paradoxically disassociate from ourselves, while also generating new associations from this same sense of detachment which overall give us a stronger feeling of connection to the world.

It is in its special role as an intermediary between our interior selves and the larger chaos of modern life that poetry, or at least good poetry governed by the imagination, most nobly mirrors and mimics how consciousness works.

These themes I explored a little in my last book so it should be no surprise why I am drawn to poets and poems that delve into similar terrain. Two terrific Canadian poets who play in the metaphysical realm and practical philosophy are Sue Sinclair in Breaker and Chris Hutchinson in Other People’s Lives both by Brick books.

In an interview he did recently with Alessandro Porco for Open Book Toronto, Hutchinson wrote that, “perhaps this is the crux of the collection: how language, which might be the closest thing we have to telepathy, haunts the no-man’s land between interiority and exteriority, between self and other. Although the book is ostensibly ‘about’ a whole host of things: sidewalks; cockroaches; cities; Aeolian harps — I think it’s really about this liminal space where the weird abundance of the imagination pushes out into, or even back against (as W. Stevens suggests) reality (if such a thing exists).”

What Hutchinson is talking about in terms of language and imagination above is very much what C.K. Williams addresses in his book Poetry and Consciousness when he says, “poetry moves through our perceptions and our mind to a place beyond either, a place which participates concretely in both consciousness and sense”(133). A good poem of Hutchinson’s that illustrates the relationship of consciousness and sense is his sonnet “Homeless” from the first section of his book:

Homeless

You weren’t here, the morning light
inside the mist-hazed park where mushrooms
flared like fleshy bells. I almost believed
my mind had grown tendrils and bloomed.

Old women disguised as crows stuttered past,
jigging upon the sleeping city’s hip bone,
flirting between the horizon and beer cans
coated with the aspic glow of moonstones.

Drunk, you slept here once, then withdrew—
your mind a sticky as a wound, reopening.
Poor pupil of homelessness, you never knew
delirium could become your dwelling—

Yes, a place of twisted hues, of doubled sight,
But a house just the same, built of light.

After reading this poem, I thought of Tu Fu and what he said about “a blood-stained spirit has no home”. Like much Chinese poetry, Hutchinson introduces the sorrow that comes with human existence amidst nature’s indifference in the first stanza when he writes “You weren’t here, the morning light / inside the misty hazed park where mushrooms / flared like fleshy bells.” The use of the second person also helps to create this sense of distance and isolation. But then in the second stanza , what saves the narrator from despair is the influence of the imagination bumping up against nature’s indifference, generating its own images, like old women “disguised as crows” and beer cans that take on “the aspic glow of moonstones.” The third stanza reinforces that the poem is a reflection on intoxication, on the loss of ego and the feelings of heightened consciousness that attend it; however, at the time, the poet did not recognize his experience as anything transcendent for afterwards his mind was “sticky as a wound, reopening” and says “Poor pupil of homelessness, you never knew / delirium could become your dwelling—“. It is only in retrospect that the relationship between consciousness and sense is elevated for in the final couplet the poet writes “Yes, a place of twisted hues, of doubled sight / but a house just the same, built of light.”

Consciousness and sense are also exalted presences in Breaker by Sue Sinclair as are language and the imagination. How Sinclair differs from Hutchinson is that she takes a less narrative and more lyrical approach, one that more directly tries to apprehend the transcendent amid the ordinary through the intensity of her concentrated gaze. Take, for instance, her poem “Joy” which figures in the third section of her new collection:

Joy

Everything leafs out as though in praise.
Beaky water lilies rise from the pond’s stirred muck.
The imagination calls to the world, its inflected echo
coming back to us as light rippling on the back of the real.
Who can say what goes on in the darkened room
from which these idle green days emerge; for all we know
being here might be another kind of absence, a hole
through which our lives come pouring as we fade slowly
in another world. But this world is the one we know,
the one we hold onto, filling ourselves with its visible truths.
We work through the hours, always too few,
packing them into our greedy bodies. Yet we fall prey
to the occasional twinge, hear faintly at our backs
a thrumming, like the bowstring of a shot arrow.
And that sound is what clinches it, our love of this place,
its thin blood penetrating to our very quick.

In this poem, Sinclair sublimates the concerns of the self and looks wholly on the world as it “leafs out in praise” for if this is all we have beyond ourselves, it is only through a concentrated engagement with the world that we are rescued from the despair of human existence, or quoting Tu fu again, the fate of the ‘homeless ghost.’ As Sinclair tells us, it is the imagination that “calls out to the world, its inflected echo / coming back to us as light rippling on the back of the real”. Again it is our imaginations, generating images and associations on the flip-side of our sense, that give us a feeling of greater intimacy and connection with the world, and thus greater ease with ourselves.

Nevertheless, even though our imaginations provide us with strong sense of connection to a world “we hold onto, filling ourselves with its visible truths”, Sinclair remind us that our imaginations are not enough to make us forget what awaits us for we still “fall prey/ to the occasional twinge, hear faintly at our backs a thrumming, like the bowstring of a shot arrow.” And yet, for Sinclair, it is this sense of our mortality that “clinches it, our love of this place” and pushes us to seek greater connections to a world beyond ourselves through our imaginations.

There is much more to both of these Canadian poets than I have time to share with you. If you liked these poems, I urge you to go pick up Chris Hutchinson’s Other People’s Lives and Sue Sinclair’s Breaker, both by Brick Books.

February 28, 2010

http://chrisbanksy.blogspot.com/2010/02/consciousness-and-sense-chris.html

Finely crafted divagations – Michael Kenyon explores the meaning of home in a new collection

The Daily Review, Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Reviewed by Judith Fitzgerald

A fabulous collection, The Last House, British Columbian Michael Kenyon’s third full-length volume (following Rack of Lamb and The Sutler), wrestles with conceptions of “self” and “otherness” from the get-go in its finely crafted divagations:

“In a new country you neither / belong nor don’t but hope to guess your soul’s / purpose.”

Kenyon, born in the UK, came home from away in 1967; thus, issues of emigration in the lost and foundering spirit of settling sinuously dominate these exquisitely shaped reflections, combining the physical vernacular with the visionary spectacular.

What makes a homeland a home; how can a house turn upsy-turvily into a haven for sorrow and joy; and, most keenly, why has “the climax of the capitalist dream and the urge (nostalgia?) for a simpler life . . . a small house, a smaller house, no house” driven citizens of this grievous world to the fringes of muddle-class despair? Here’s What We Have:

… Exile breathes in the fat shadows of trees.
I give up listing my different selves,
measuring the distance from outside to
inside, from urban to rural. The thump
of a grouse intersects the jet’s thin jazz.
The walls of this world are quite soft and rain
on palm fronds whispers like people coming
through the forest whose floor unleashes green
heads of new ferns. I keep going over
the same ground. Ghosts, music, all under wraps.

Contributing reviewer and In Other Words blogger Judith Fitzgerald lives in Northern Ontario’s Almaguin Highlands. She is completing her 30th work, a poetry collection provisionally titled Rogue Lightning, slated for 2010 release.