Why Should We Read Sue Goyette?
Reviewed by Brian Bartlett ((Introduction for her Saint Mary’s University Reading – Feb. 7, 2012– all quotations from Outskirts or Undone))
because when we read her lines “In the center of all good ideas is a miniature Einstein / jumping up and down, demanding more mystery,” our minds might jump up and down,
because she writes so accurately of friendship & communities of the kitchen,
because she speaks so sharply of exhaustion & time – “Remember the mantra: minutes only feel like teeth. Minutes // only feel like teeth,”
because, reborn as a Haligonian, she has welcomed Gus’s Pub into not one but two poems,
because her prose poem “The Canadian Apology” begins, “We’re sorry we’re so sorry but we are sorry” and later admits, “We take an eternity to back into a parking spot and then feel sorry for all the unparked cars still circling; we’re even sorry for feeling a little lucky,”
because she can turn figure-skater fast from belly-laughable humour to tough wisdom, or vice-versa,
because she writes poems about her children that honour their solitary spaces & their selves while casting a clear eye on her unexpungeable role as mother,
because she jolts us with the simultaneous strangeness & rightness of comments like “The spirit of a praying mantis would like an audience / with all teenage girls. It wants to tell them they both share / the long-limbed green hope of melting into leaves / and the same aphid hunger to be noticed,”
because she’s outdone Carl Sandburg as a poet of the fog, which she calls “the Mafioso of wind / coming to collect its street corners and the mastermind behind / getting lost,”
because outskirts embraces the city but also moves out to the harbour, the coastal communities, the moose on the road, & the ocean, which “transgresses, forgets its place / and sends its tentacles out into the city to eat its lights / and tender shoes,”
because her knack for personification gives us passages like “The night waded into the ocean. Up to its waist, it looked back to us on the shore. Its look / was morose and someone said: Why is it going out so far?”,
because she mulls over the absence of literal dark in our civilization, & metaphorical dark too, Lorca’s duende, & sees “an // exodus of us craving its redemptive waters,”
because her poems blend recognition of violence & cruelty with openness to compassion – “Forgive the chain gang of puns, your recurring dream of termites asking: ‘Is the bar tender here? Is the bar tender here?”,
because she speaks so much for those of us born in pre-metric Canada when she writes, “Don’t give it to us in metric. We need gallons / of it, a mile in your shoes, quarts of the sweet elixir of calmness,”
because “For the Poem I Read On October 24th” is addressed to a poem lost in the poet’s memory, but also ranges out to many other losses,
because we do well to hear a Goyette poem many times, so I feel only a smidgeon of guilt for extracting lines from poems she might be reading to us tonight,
because she says things you can hardly imagine being said better: “There has to be a small seed of amnesia / in every kiss or we’d remember // how there’s a small seed of ending / in every beginning,”
because her poems “love the way we bend down and pick up all the pieces / we’ve dropped. How we gather the springs and gaskets, // the cogged words of regret and dump them on the kitchen table, / scratch our heads and start again,”
because her poems do what she says the haiku of Issa do, “go on teaching of the great ocean beneath all that is said"
