Through the Veil and Back
Review of Field Notes for the Self by Randy Lundy
by Natalie Co
In Field Notes for the Self, Cree poet Randy Lundy weaves a series of bleak, solitary meditations into a deep-rooted record of existence. This collection opens with two epigraphs. First, a passage from one of the principal scriptures of Hinduism, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, affirms the oneiric: “the human being has two states of consciousness: one in his world, the other in the next. But there is a third state between them, not unlike the world of dreams, in which we are aware of both worlds, with their sorrows and joys.” The second is a quotation from the poet Charles Wright: “proper attention is our refuge now, our perch and our praise.” Indeed, Lundy’s poems prize “proper attention.” Each is a meditation drawn from observations of the real world. Yet this world is not the only space in which Lundy exists. Carrying generations of history on his back, Lundy navigates the liminal “third state,” the gauzy veil between the worlds, between the tangible and intangible, the living and dead, and the physical and metaphysical.
Lundy, a longtime resident of Saskatchewan, tracks and traces the physical landscapes around him in his Field Notes. Many works in this collection are prose poems in which the opening lines evoke matter-of-fact log entries. For example, “Saskatchewan, February, full moon, forty degrees below zero, and fifty-kilometre-an-hour wind-gusts out of the northwest” (“February: Full-Moon Meditation”). In a sparse, bare language, Lundy avoids imposing his own ideas upon the natural world. Instead, he lets meaning emerge on its own. He strives to read “what … the wind has written on the snow overnight” (“First of December”).
This is no simple task. The act of reading is fraught with “epistemological and ontological problems” (“Heraclitus, or Herakleitos: Spell It as You Wish, I Don’t Give a Damn”). In “Heraclitus, or Herakleitos,” Lundy laments that “people can’t look at the world, can’t really see what’s there, much less begin to speak, to say anything that corresponds to reality.” This difficulty is manifest when he notes “a female Richardson’s merlin” in his yard and recalls others who have observed birds: Leonard Cohen in “Bird on the Wire,” the Beatles in “Blackbird,” and the poet Wallace Stevens in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Because each person is looking at the bird from a unique perspective, each has a different conception of it. As readers, we consider which view is accurate to reality, and whether the words we use correspond to the things they stand for. If “flight patterns are Chinese characters, / and Arabic script, and Cree syllabics” (“Autumn, with Blackbirds”), which language and which words render these flight patterns most accurately? The act of reading the landscape and putting it into words calls into question the connection between the real world and our representation of it. Lundy, as an observer and writer, therefore inhabits the liminal space between reality and representation.
Such semiotic matters are not the only thing weighing heavily on Lundy’s words. His poems are haunted with memory. Along with his Cree ancestry, he has inherited the history of other Indigenous people who came before him, including those who suffered in life and remain restless in death. For Lundy, there exists only the slightest veil between the living and the dead: the latter have “stepped to the other side of a paper-thin sheet,” beyond which they can be heard “rustling like mice in the walls” (“Pense, Saskatchewan, 2016”). In the free verse poem “Arbeit Macht Frei,” Lundy further nuances the concept of ghosts. The speaker in this poem is “inconsolably angry” as he confronts the history and legacy of Canadian colonialism. Here, history is not simply a tormented whisper, nor is it an invisible burden to be carried by the living. Rather, the ghosts of the past are both ubiquitous and tangible in the present reality. Lundy uses the repetition of the word “rotting” to describe the corpses of slaughtered bison, missing and murdered Indigenous women, the teeth of the “children fed fat on McDonald’s,” and the “stench / of every Indian man in every Indian bar,” all tragedies caused directly or indirectly by the Canadian government.
The act of yoking a single word like “rotting” to multiple implications opens onto a complex subjectivity. As an observer of the world, Lundy encounters the “epistemological and ontological problems” discussed above in the endless possibilities that obscure the channel between words and reality. As an inheritor of his people’s history, however, he uses this ambiguity of meaning to solidify his nebulous dead and the injustices that shimmer at the edge of our cultural consciousness. Thus, Lundy is simultaneously the observer struggling with sign and referent, the navigator of the no-man’s land between the living and the dead, and the heir and embodiment of history and culture.
The complication of the subject occasions no abdication of the poetic tasks of seeing, feeling, and knowing. A virtue of this collection is its images, especially the observations that recur most often. Through the flux of the liminal “third state” are persistent things: across his collection of poems, Lundy documents “coffee and cigarette[s]” (“Must All the New Answers…”), birds—from “Tennessee warbler[s]” (“Pense, Saskatchewan, 2016”) to “great grey owl[s]” (Ceremony)—and his dogs, who “[sing] with the sound of a passing train” (“Field Notes For the Self”). His poems move from grounded observations of the landscape, to philosophical and metaphysical thoughts, and finally back to tangible reality. We see the simple parts of his life emerging time and time again both to inspire and to ground various trains of thought; we witness multiplicities emerging from singular elements. As a whole, Lundy’s collection expresses the theme that “in one there are many kinds; / in two there is no duality” (“Lines with No Opinion Regarding Indigenous Mythical Realism”)—–in other words, that the diversity in the world stems from a binding unity. A single thing can be read in an infinite number of ways. With this principle, one shared by semiotics, philosophy, spirituality, and poetry, the collection is ultimately true to the physical world in all its possibility.
Field Notes for the Self sees Lundy tracking and tracing things through the landscape around him. He struggles to read signs; surrounded constantly by his history and his dead, he struggles with the semiotics of meaning in a bleak world. However, by chronicling the cornerstones of his everyday life, he is able to navigate the world. All of Lundy’s thoughts, all the places his mind explores, find their way back to instances of simple existence in the physical world. “Believe your eyes and ears,” he says (“Book of Medicine”). Through bleak uncertainty, something else draws us on.
Works Cited
Randy Lundy. Field Notes for the Self. University of Regina Press, 2020.
Natalie Co is completing a degree in honours psychology at McGill University. She is co-president of the Mcsway Poetry Collective.
17 January 2025
Slow Dance in Deep Time
Review of Madhur Anand, Parasitic Oscillations
by Jackson Pinkowski
Madhur Anand’s second and latest collection of poetry, Parasitic Oscillations, is a work that challenges any unified notion of poetic convention. On first glance, readers may be surprised to find diagrams of ordinary differential equations alongside photographs of taxidermized birds; those averse to scientific jargon may gulp at the collection’s title alone. However, as one starts to read Anand’s work, what one finds is poetry that is not only demanding but readable. The collection’s greatest virtue is its subversion of generic expectation. Divided neatly into seven parts, Parasitic Oscillationsopens with an investigation into the scientific form of birdsong and then unravels into a polyphonic musing on the historical and the natural, the lost and the found, the personal and most importantly the poetic. It diverges from what one has come to anticipate in ecopoetry and confessional poetry.
The words of this book have a curious semblance of double-speak; the poet crafts lines loaded with multiple meanings that ask readers to conduct their own research. In turn, one is sent on a quest for meaning for rich diction like “Matlab,” “syrinx,” and “bifurcation.” The collection’s title itself questions one’s assumed knowledge of words and how they change with a shift of context. What exactly is the “parasitic,” what is “oscillation,” and are they different in poetry and in science? The fraught significance of words is a live issue throughout, especially where the speaker admits to almost writing “feather” instead of “father” or “sing” in place of “sign.”
Anand’s collection weaves together eclectic Canadiana, whisking the reader from London, Ontario, and its Storybook Gardens (“Animal Behaviour”), to Montreal and its perennially futuristic biosphere (“Parametric Oscillation”), along the way collecting “dime sailboats and quartered caribou.” Although Anand’s familiar image of a child learning about currency in “Summations” is both charming and recognizable to a Canadian audience, the poet never misses the opportunity to subvert and surprise: “Learning how to make change / is one of the hardest things we will tackle this year.” Whether it is the language of the classroom or the laboratory, Anand transforms the unassuming into the striking, not least through brilliant wordplay.
In the collection’s sixth part, made up of passages pulled from A.O. Hume’s The Nest and Eggs of Indian Birds,Anand harnesses the latent poetic potential of found documents. Where another poet would surgically splice a primary text into a poem, Anand transplants it whole, letting full passages stand in their own right. This bold decision gives Hume’s document a living quality that only further underscores the larger arc of Parasitic Oscillations. The reader is forced to understand the destruction caused in the name of scientific progress and the destruction caused in the name of imperial progress.
The collection reaches its height in its last and longest poem, “Slow Dance.” Markedly influenced by John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (both poems adhere to the same number of lines and stanzas), “Slow Dance” serves as a refined culmination of Anand’s unique poetic voice and mission. This is especially true when it comes to the convergence of the scientific and poetic traditions. An empirical fact within the realm of science becomes equally true in the world of poetry: “It is very difficult to accept / bistability even after physicists / find it everywhere: the brain, the heart, the riverbed.” Though one might not understand the concept of bistability in physics, it is intuited with Anand’s guidance. For all its enigmatic abstractions and dual meanings, “Slow Dance” is most potent where it is tersest: “The birds in my head are now in yours.” Stripping back scientific language, Anand captures the ineffable and mystical power of poetry.
Any poet’s claim to have once and for all bridged the disciplines of science and art must be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, should they therefore be totally separated? One feels in Madhur Anand’s Parasitic Oscillation the deep unity that precedes classification and specialization. The poet asserts connections that have always existed; songs and nightmares can be mapped onto mathematical systems, just as poetry can be the structure by which one understands the spread of a pandemic, the building of a geodesic dome, or the conversational inflections of birdsong. Although science and poetry may routinely be characterized as opposing forces, Anand has revealed the flaws of any simplistic duality. What can be said for certain is that the trill of birdsong rings more strangely and beautifully after a reading of Madhur Anand’s Parasitic Oscillations.
Works Cited
Anand, Madhur. Parasitic Oscillations. McClelland & Stewart, 2022.
Jackson Pinkowski was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. He is completing his joint honours degree in English literature and Russian studies at McGill University.
17 January 2025
Gorging on Sound: Stephen Kuusisto’s Auditory Poetic Imagination
Review of Stephen Kuusisto, Only Bread, Only Light
by Mathilda Stock
What does it mean to write poetry without vision? Stephen Kuusisto’s collection, Only Bread, Only Light (2001) is an ode to seeing without sight and to envisioning spaces when vision falters and only light and shadow are left. The collection is a tacit exploration of the visuality of auditory and sensory experience, both within the external world and within the practice of poetry. Kuusisto’s auditory sensibility informs his subjective experiences of vision loss, offering readers a glimpse into alternative modes envisioning poetry and configuring life.
The work thematizes the experiences of vision loss, drawing attention to displaced vision through striking language. In four sections, Kuusisto deftly weaves together classical myth and Finnish landscapes with everyday subjects close to the heart: dedications to his guide dog, reflections on learning to read braille at age thirty-nine, and meditations on a childhood creasing under the pressure of decaying vision. This interest in classical myth, Finnish landscapes, and the beauty in the mundane informs questions of life and being—especially without sight. Kuusisto’s poetic imagination culminates in an invitation to the reader to join the poet in considering an alternative mode of vision an imaginative inner vision stimulated through poetic sound.
As “Seven Prayers” states, “It’s the rapture of looking / That gives us want.” This striking use of “rapture” engenders and implies an overwhelming emotional force that lifts away vision, leaving a lack—or, indeed, a want. The first-person plural pronoun implicates readers, abstracting our vision, too. Thereby, a collective want is crafted, and a visionary desire arises.
In the title poem of the collection, Kuusisto speaks to the fulfillment of this want. “At times the blind see light, / And that moment is the Sistine ceiling, / Grace among buildings” (“Only Bread, Only Light”). This light flashes from other poems, which focus on auditory stimulation as a prosthetic for vision. Contrastingly, this poem strips the senses until only the scent of bread and the glimmering of light remain. The poem’s incandescent Sistine ceiling alleviates the visual want, offering a transcendent moment of a widened scope of sensory experience. As the light filters through, the world around the speaker fades away and only the serene experience of the wafting scent of bread and luminescent visual perception remain—a moment of grace in a tenebrous, bustling city.
This luminous flash within city streets is echoed in “Accomplice,” as well:
It was in the nature of things
That I couldn’t see. The nature of things
That the magpie should watch me. Perpetual strangers
Touch my sleeves,
The steel light of August
Draws me, affirming
Over brilliant and terrible streets,
And the bird looks on—
This poem takes on a more dismal modality; however, watchful birds emerge here as an important motif. Perhaps modelling the freedom and keen eyesight inaccessible to the speaker themselves, birds are a motif flitting through the whole collection.
Much of the collection, however, lingers on the other side of this want, where visual lack fulfilled only by auditory stimulation. “Open Window” is representative:
Atlas steals the apple of Hesperides,
Runs to the tall grass
Where he gorges unobserved.
Who would say that appetite
Is not of the ear?
Such gorging of sound and craving for it is central to Kuusisto’s collection. Placing his work in conversation with the classical tradition, Kuussito offers a palpable commentary on poetic consumption, alongside his meditations on sensory want. Who is to say that poetic appetite is not also of the ear?
This aural desire carries on in poems such as “Descant on Climbing and Descending Stairs:”
I was listening. My job was to keep track of sounds. Maybe this had to do with my failing eyesight. Maybe not. I was slipping down the throat of life. I was caught trying to hear the viscera of things…
The poem continues, “sound, like love, can be sudden and threatening.” This poem draws out the dual nature of any grand sensory and human experience as simultaneously stupendous and frightening. Perhaps it speaks to the sublime waiting to be uncovered under the surface of sensory stimulations.
As in “Open Window,” Kuusisto merges aural desire with poetic appetite in “At the Woods’ Edge.” In this work, he engages the creative process, writing on inspiration:
As I get older
The incidental lyric
Slips through the dark trees,
But honestly I can’t tell
What it means—
Here, Kuusisto transforms being into a caliginous forest, a dual symbol of the mind and vision. Through the thicket, lyrics slip like visionary streams of light, engendering mysterious poetic influence. Light echoes like sound through the somber wood of the mind, inciting inspiration.
Kuusisto’s collection ends with “Night Seasons,” perhaps one of the strongest pieces in the collection. The poem follows a blind speaker who listens to books on “the Kurzweil Scanner; / An electronic reader / For the blind.” The final stanza reads:
I’m the fool
Of the night seasons,
Reading anything, anything.
When daylight comes
And you see me on the street
Or standing for the bus,
Think of the Greek term
Entelechy
Word for soul and body
Constructing each other
After dark.
Here again, Kuusisto engages the motif of poetic—or literary—consumption and eclipsed light. Under the veil of the night, the speaker awakens, being “the fool / Of the night seasons,” but also reigning over them, unobstructedly embarking on a journey of consumption. Perhaps it is this consumption which fulfills the want of “Seven Prayers;” a means of self-definition and self-construction in the safety and solitude of the dark where only some can read. Indeed, this poem follows in the tradition of the blanket of night as a time for alternative visions at large. It is a powerful and empowering counterbalance to the version of the speaker visible in daylight; the night seasons level the playing field. They are the realm of alternative experiences and appetites that Kuusisto’s poetry invites us to explore.
With Only Bread, Only Light, Stephen Kuusisto proffers a window into blind life, provoking us too to consider, cherish, and seek out auditory stimulation. Birds soar through the collection and between and within the lines of Kuusisto’s imagination. Think of these birds as an invitation to listen and to meditate beyond these pages. Kuusisto’s collection reminds us that the world around us is alive not only when it is visible.
Works Cited
Kuusisto, Stephen. Only Bread, Only Light. Copper Canyon Press, 2000.
Mathilda Stock grew up in Toronto, Ontario. She is completing her honours English degree at McGill University and serving as the social media coordinator of the Montreal Prize.
17 January 2025
Who Has Access to the Archive?
Review of Mai Der Vang, Yellow Rain
by Miranda Pate
In her second poetry collection, Yellow Rain, Mai Der Vang confronts a history that has been swept under the rug for over fifty years – the truth about the “yellow rain” that fell onto Hmong refugees at the end of the war in Vietnam in the 1970s. The strange precipitation, toxic to plants and animals, was initially under investigation as a biological weapon, but American officials then rejected the evidence and the experiences of the Hmong to claim instead that the “yellow rain” was the feces of bees, a naturally occurring phenomenon. Exposing the inconsistencies of these claims, Vang leverages poetry to bring justice to a group whom history left behind. Equal parts heart-wrenching verse and robust archival analysis, Yellow Rain uses declassified government documents to defy the erasure of the experiences of the Hmong. Through striking formal organisation, contrasts between the sterility of government documents and resounding natural imagery, and a thread of hope, Vang creates a collection that demonstrates the power of poetry and narrative for retribution and testimony.
Vang’s use of form in every poem is astounding. No two poems look the same or have the same metre, and each poem takes up space on the page in a way that is visually interesting and unique. In some poems, Vang blends the formal elements of archival documents with the language of poetry, creating a work that demonstrates the tensions between the sterility of government reports and the beauty of Hmong oral storytelling. For example, in “Self-Portrait Together as CBW Questionnaire,” Vang uses the structure of a survey form sent to Hmong refugees but changes the words so that every element on the page is part of the poem (34–36). With the spaces for answers still present on the page, there is a choppy disconnect that represents the incompatibility of the rigid American documentation with Hmong cultural traditions. This remains a central tension throughout the collection, as Vang grapples with the erasure of Hmong culture in the larger inquiry into yellow rain using the very documents that she rejects as false.
Who has access to history when the archive is biased? By including documents describing the Hmong as “medically unsophisticated victims” (99) and “illiterate indigenous people” (156) who are unable to tell the difference between bee pollen and chemical weapons, Vang demonstrates that the Hmong were not allowed to help write this history: their experiences are still being ignored to this day. She highlights that the Hmong were not taken seriously, partially because of their oral culture. She quotes the New Yorker: “the Hmong are some of the best storytellers on earth. They can make up stories faster than you and I can write them down” (158). Juxtaposing such statements with a renewed attention to Hmong stories and testimony restores a place in history for the Hmong.
Vang’s poems employ many depictions of nature. She weaves imagery and metaphors such as “evening birdsong” (26) and “rain as refugee” (85) into a collection that examines what has historically been considered scientific fact. “Specimens from Ban Vinai Camp, 1983” clearly demonstrates a tension between twentieth-century science and nature. The form of the poem employs real headings used for specimen samples from the Hmong, yet the descriptions underneath each heading combine bodily descriptions with visceral depictions of nature. For example, the lines, “Blood (heparin) from breath of a conifer of the most feral cold” and “Blood (heparin) from ecru river embodied once as an elder lake” (48), are labelled under the heading “5. Male 30 / Sample Collected 21. Jan 1983 / Last exposure in Laos to “chemical rain”: Nov. 1982.” Vang uses these descriptions to demonstrate that the Hmong do not see these things with the same rigidity as the scientists, thereby emphasizing that there are many different ways to interpret observations. Furthermore, the integration of nature-based metaphors and government documents demonstrates the connection that the Hmong have to nature and thus contradicts the American government’s claims that the Hmong were unable to differentiate between pollen and poison. By representing a people who are in tune with the natural world to an extent that cannot be neatly transcribed, Vang rejects the long-held belief that the Hmong could not tell the difference between bee feces and chemical weapons. She thus opens our collective history to new possibilities.
Finally, there are elements of resilience in this collection. Vang demonstrates that the American government’s attempts to isolate the Hmong from nature and turn them against the bees (a part of the ecosystem that they had understood for generations) never succeeded. Indeed, Vang continually compares the Hmong to the bees, demonstrating that they have and maintain a relationship with them: in “Allied with the Bees,” she writes “we have hiked / These hills without shoes, long / Enough to hunt alongside the bees” and “what happened / To the bees also happened to us” (131). She also writes, “When my parents recalled what they knew about yellow rain, they did not speak of bees” (161), demonstrating that despite the American intent to falsify history, the Hmong maintained their relationship with the bees and did not allow American officials to redefine their experiences. The final poem of the collection, “And Yet Still More,” looks to the present and the future, drawing from the analysis of yellow rain and applying it to other situations of historical erasure, remarking “That refugee fathers sit outside of high schools waiting for the bell / That landmines excel at waiting” (180). The messages from this collection can be expanded to other cases of erasure and falsification. They also indicate the toll that waiting for the truth can have on the groups affected. With her final poem, Vang concludes her insightful recombination of art and archive. She asserts that we are still barely scratching the surface of a history of violence, erasure, and falsification, but that poetry, art, and storytelling give us the power to reclaim history.
Works Cited
Vang, Mai Der. Yellow Rain: Poems. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2021.
Miranda Pate grew up in Calgary, Alberta, and is a recent graduate from McGill University, where she completed a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in English Cultural Studies.
Suspended in Amber
Review of Caroline Bird, The Air Year
by Izzi Holmes
In The Air Year, the English poet and playwright Caroline Bird explores the liminal forms and implications of love as it runs its course. The title concept, “air year,” is defined in the poem “Temporary Vows,” as “the anniversary prior to paper / for which ephemeral gifts are traditional.” This definition undergirds the collection. Throughout, Bird articulates the joys and horrors of an existence that eludes convention. By presenting love as a form of suspension, a suspending agent, and a product of suspension, Bird literalizes its liminality. She takes the idea of an “air year” a step further by suspending her reader in the “ephemeral gift” of each poem, bringing this account of love as suspension into the realm of the real.
Bird begins her exploration of love as suspension in her opening poem, aptly titled “Mid-air.” In it she asserts the speaker’s proximity to the reader, and thus implicates the reader in the poem. At the start of this first poem, the speaker addresses the reader directly: “[t]here is a corner of the city where the air is / soft resin. Step in and it hardens / around you. Suspended / in amber.” This imagery encourages readers to imagine themselves in a poetic world. Phrases like “step in” as well as the word “you” supplement this invitation, beckoning the reader to enter and participate in the creation of this liminal space. The opening lines thus establish the relationship between the speaker and the reader, the theme of liminality, and the necessity of collaborative creation within the poem and the collection.
Also in “Mid-air,” Bird introduces the literal component of suspension in the work, and establishes the ways in which time and space operate differently in this imaginative realm. The prefix “mid” transforms into “midway,” “mid-leap,” “mid-air,” and “mid-spin,” and therefore becomes a refrain that disrupts the linear flow of time. Through this polyptoton, Bird traps her reader in an infinite present where conventions of temporality and physicality melt away and love starts to take its course. She also punctuates the work with the word “and.” It frames both sentences and lines throughout the poem, supporting a reading of “Mid-air” as a representation of the fluid boundaries of this “air year” in which time stops and love lives. The repetition reinforces similar images of literal suspensions – the space separating rooftops, the upbeat of a note, and the moment between two breaths – and subsequently affirms Bird’s extended metaphor of love as suspension.
Love is suspended between reality and disbelief in “Flicker,” a poem that articulates the transformative power of creation, but through the eyes of a Prufrockian speaker. In the lines, “Hello single / strand of hair across my forehead / like a subtle crack in the universe,” the speaker re-scales reality by magnifying minutiae. The re-scaling is hyperbolic, but readers have no choice but to go with it. The speaker lifts oppressive conventions to discover a liminal space of possibility: “I can kick things to life. / Kiss. Be kissed to life. Feel / my pulse, it’s back.” The enjambment emphasizes freedom. Logically, we cannot replicate these actions, but we do, stepping into the sphere of possibility that the creative act makes. Bird shows that in the imaginative space of the poem, a strand of hair can fracture the entire world, a kiss can revive, and, as she states in the concluding line, a goldfish can take on the responsibility of a flickering “wet flame.”
Towards the end of the collection, in “It Sneaks Up On You,” the sense of wonder that liminality brings begins to wane, as Bird documents the act of making art in relation to its final product. Direct addresses bookend this poem: the speaker tells the reader that, although “[y]ou determined the exact position of the stencil” at the beginning, at the end of this project “[y]ou … took a step back, jumped and screamed.” The reader is not exempt from this chaotic undoing. Despite an author’s best efforts to control the outcome of the work, its meaning is uncontrollable once the structure of the stencil falls away. The negative space is of equal weight to the positive space in the creation of meaning. Neither the artist nor the critic determines a work’s final significance. This poem celebrates the unpredictability of the creative process – and yet Bird’s exploration of love throughout The Air Year asks for a second reading of “It Sneaks Up On You,” for the poem is also a commentary on the collaboration in relationships. In liminal moments, between recognized and unrecognized promises of devotion, Bird observes that the beginning or end of a relationship can come without warning. By placing this poem near the end of the collection, Bird emphasizes the arc of love in the work, arguing that a liminal love that evades beginnings and endings must at some point turn to one or the other. Nothing can stay suspended forever. There is as much hope as pessimism in this observation, however, for it is not only the end but also the beginning of love that sneaks up on us.
The Air Year is a masterful juxtaposition of confession and wit that simultaneously traverses the metaphysical and the intimate to account for our liminal, luminous relationships. As each poem in the collection describes a moment between the breaths of first and final lines, every account of experience is as fleeting and eternal as the experience itself. Marrying form and content, Caroline Bird engages the reader in the liminal spaces that she creates. The Air Year encapsulates the suspension of its title on every page.
Works Cited
Bird, Caroline. The Air Year. Carcanet Press, 2020.
Izzi Holmes is a rising fourth-year student at McGill University double majoring in Honours English literature and psychology. She was born and raised in New York City.
10 June 2024
An Infinite Emergence
Review of Jessie Jones, The Fool
by Natalie Co
In her 2020 debut collection, The Fool, Jessie Jones inhabits a world where “Allow yourself / to make you is cross-stitched / at the bough of every ingress.” To navigate through Jones’s striking sequence of poems is to embark on a journey of becoming. In tarot, her eponymous fool is assigned the number zero and represents beginnings. Just as the perfectly round zero cannot be traced back to a single point of origin on the page, the fool has no specific place within the tarot deck. Rather, it represents unlimited potential and can therefore be placed either at the beginning or end of the deck, rendering the tarot sequence cyclical. Similarly, Jones’s collection is segregated into numbered sections of 0, I, II, III, and 0 once more. As suggested by its title and circular structure, The Fool invites its readers into a world of constant evolution and dizzying self-discovery.
Jones begins The Fool with a quote from Lisa Robertson: “If pleasure emancipates, why aren’t you somewhere.” This demand accompanies “Itinerants,” the sole poem in section 0. In this poem, Jones boils the mysteries of the human condition down to a neat arrangement of questions, each comprising a single end-stopped line. She asks, “How much pleasure can we permit in ourselves? / Will its fervour signal lightning, act a kind of metal? / Why did it take so long to find a weapon in weather?” Here, and in Lisa Robertson’s words, Jones illuminates an overlap between our internal and external worlds. We struggle to harness the ephemeral strikes of external pleasure into the enduring “metal” of a personal “weapon” with which we can navigate the turbulent storm of life. Although Jones expresses these existential struggles in a precisely organized list of questions, the realities of such issues cannot be so easily encapsulated. Life is a constant negotiation between the self and the external world; we revisit these questions again and again in a perpetual cycle; we grow and evolve with each iteration of these negotiations. “Itinerants,” therefore, not only introduces self-actualization as an interaction between our internal and external worlds, but also suggests through its title that this process recursively leads us to a state of constant emergence.
“The moment before” further reflects the recursive nature of becoming. This poem begins with “a flash, a fresh egg sails back toward the pan” and unfolds with a similar structure, flitting across commas from phrase to phrase. Over the course of the single asyndetic sentence that constitutes this poem, we encounter seemingly unfathomable phenomena, such as “a cathedral of music assembling spires.” Jones’s use of asyndeton stretches the bounds of English grammar, while her convoluted imagery explores the limits of our imagination and the words we use to express ourselves. Through both form and language, she defies conventionality, crafting a poem that reflects the unique experience of becoming: no two individuals follow the exact same path of growth, nor does there exist a simple formula to self-actualization. Like Jones’s self-assembling cathedral of music, the self creates its own song, building upon its previous echoes. Through our unique recursivity, we begin over and over again; with the infinite potential of a “fresh egg,” we “[sail] back” to yet another start.
Whereas “The moment before” broadly conceptualizes the nature of becoming, “The fool” explores the specific mechanisms behind this process. In this poem, Jones “move[s] through the city like a bundle of kindling,” waiting “for a bit of friction to transform [her].” Just as a fire requires both kindling and friction, we only begin to evolve when our inner potential is sparked by external forces. In “The fool,” the most prominent of these forces is external validation: Jones “want[s] to be seen” and fantasizes about a world “where / everyone is doubled over in love / with [her].” This desire “wants to begin, original / and sinful, in jest.” In referencing the original sin, Jones suggests that our hedonic need for outside recognition is innate. Furthermore, she uses personification to highlight how powerful this desire is: in “want[ing] to begin,” she suggests that our need for validation has its own desires and thus some level of autonomy. This innate need exerts its influence over us, driving us toward the recognition we need in order to fully realize our latent potential.
In “Year of the rabbit,” Jones shapes the themes of recursivity and external recognition into a personal narrative. Using the second-person point of view, she tells her former self how she “will emerge a lucid / stream from thin, trivial pools” in the prairies but “dispose of every ounce / of backstory” and “flee further into the rush” of the city. In contrast to “the famine of the flat prairies,” the whirling excitement of the city is an ever-changing landscape that, with “fennel-seed sausage / and post-modernity,” nourishes Jones’s desire to be seen. Beneath the gaze of countless pairs of eyes, she exults in the chaos of the city: she has finally realized her fantasy of being seen. However, “when the night / finally drives [her] awake” from the pleasure of validation, Jones “will navigate / to the water marrowed and frozen by moonlight.” The city, which has left her “frozen,” comes to represent numbness and a sense of disconnection from the core self. We require recognition from others, but only in moderation, or else we may lose ourselves and let this validation pull us into a hedonic oblivion. Having returned to the water, Jones will “witness pit of sky and sea knit into an impenetrable solid.” She sees that the depths of her self have “[kept] swelling” from a stream into a sea that is now one with the vast world around her. This lucid, contemplative version of Jones may be construed as the speaker in this poem: her newfound self-awareness allows her to reflect on her past and offer guidance to her younger self. Thus, “Year of the rabbit” can be interpreted as a cyclical journey of becoming, in which Jones moves to the city, loses herself, then returns to herself with a sense of awareness that allows her to narrate this experience.
Jones ends The Fool in much the same way she begins it: with a section 0, a quotation, and a single poem. Having wandered through a multitude of works on identity and becoming, we, the readers, have arrived back at zero – the simultaneous end and beginning of the journey. In contrast with the neatly end-stopped lines of “Itinerants” in the first section 0, however, Jones’s final poem, “Infinity mirror,” has no stops. To this end, she quotes Clarice Lispector: “has it ever occurred to you that a dot, a single dot without dimensions, is the utmost solitude?” Instead of organizing her words with the literal dot of a period, Jones scatters the word “dot” throughout the poem: for example, “No dot limits exist / Infinity of the three-way / mirror is a coffin”. By removing what Lispector suggests is a symbol of dimensionlessness, Jones creates a boundless infinity. This symbolic and grammatical disorder is reflected at the structural level, as the poem itself is split across several half-filled pages. By nesting one form of disorder in another, Jones creates a fractal chaos that conveys a loss of her sense of self – she has shattered into infinite pieces. The “three-way / mirror,” which refers to the three self-referential syllables of Jones’s name, is both a space of kaleidoscopic “infinity” and “a coffin.” However, Jones finds a “chain of women holding [her] / to the world”. She calls upon these “sisters” to “resurrect all of [her],” so that her name becomes “a three-syllable prism” that will someday “be pronounced just right light refracted through its middle” so “[she]’ll multiply.” The “chain of women” that acts as Jones’s lifeline suggests the sequence of a lineage. This sense of succession has permeated The Fool through the theme of becoming, an act that iteratively builds upon previous versions of the self. In knowing that her current self is built of her past selves, Jones is able to crystallize her identity and become whole again. With this return to zero, we – alongside Jessie Jones – have reached the end of this iteration of poems and await the next beginning.
Works Cited
Jones, Jessie. The Fool. Fredericton, NB: icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions, 2020.
Natalie Co grew up in Vancouver and currently attends McGill University, where she is studying psychology with a minor in English literature.
27 June 2023
Gardens of Love and Loss
Review of Ida Faubert, Island Heart, translated by Danielle Legros Georges
by Mathilda Stock
Nearly eighty years ago, Haitian French poet Ida Faubert completed her first of two collections, Coeur des îles, a collection preoccupied with the different forms that love can take and, more specifically, the female experience of them. In 2021, Boston poet laureate Danielle Legros Georges published her translation of Faubert’s work, bringing the underrepresented poet to an anglophone audience. The collection’s main interest lies in different manifestations of love: the romantic, the platonic, the motherly, and love through grief, all depicted through natural motifs. As Legros Georges explains in her introduction, these poems from a prior century possess a keen relevance today. Faubert’s representation of feminine sensuality and perceptive comments on race and gender lift her work out of the narrow space to which it was relegated by the “white European imagination” (12–13).
Faubert’s habitus is one of blurred expectations and coalesced political identities. Born in Port-au-Prince the daughter of a Haitian president and a French woman and raised in a convent school during France’s Belle Epoque, she cannot easily be reduced to a simple demographic category (10). “Biracial, bicultural and privileged,” she challenges the social expectations of both Haiti and France. Legros Georges recovers her now as “one of Haiti’s great women poets” (14).
Island Heart surpasses expectations in its expression of intrinsically human qualities and experiences, such as love, loss, melancholy, and pleasure. The collection can be broken into three sections. The first is occupied with blissful yet transgressive love, the second with true love that cannot last, and the third with loss and grief.
In the first section, sensuality lies at the centre of each poem, daring us to think across limits. Several poems take place in obscure gardens under the veil of the night. “Tropical Night” depicts the speaker sinking into and becoming one with nature. “Evening” celebrates united silence among isolated lovers. “Dusk” embodies uncertainty and yearning, perhaps even an identity crisis. “I Would Like to Remain…” also features a nighttime garden. In this suite, love is not only strongly connected to the sensuality of the dark but also to the secrecy and indiscretion of the garden with its amatory and Biblical associations. Contrastingly, poems such as “Spring Morning,” “To No Longer Think…,” and “Sweetness” take place in gardens during the day, where spring comes as a revelation of love, and the speaker’s need for the latter is strikingly apparent. This contrast between illicit yearning and plain necessity lends the poems sapphic overtones. Female sensuality is celebrated, and the lovers’ gender is not clear. (The introduction duly nods to Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s work in this respect, 12). The stand-out poem in the first section, however, does not fall into either of these two categories. In “Pleasure,” the speaker is pleasure itself, personified: “I will say … / Intoxicate yourself with me, I am Pleasure.” The speaker’s bold claim to (presumably female) sexuality contrasts the prim expectations often set out for women.
“Halt” models the freedom for which the second section grasps: “The sun dies on the horizon. Now, already, all is fading / Our garden, our home. / But in my soul, hope keeps watch.” The poem seems to aspire to the free disclosure of non-traditional love, whether it be sapphic or other. It ends, “I am happy all the same / Because the moment I awaken / I find myself on your heart.” The remainder of this section offers lamentations on love. Faubert’s imagery is arresting. “My dream has folded its injured wings. / Yet the air is full of piercing perfumes” (“Absence”). “When you see me crushed at your feet / Collect, bare-handed, my poor beating heart” (“Love”). “Discouragement,” at the end of section two, is the most desperate so far:
Sustain me, defend me. I suffer …
At times I feel an abyss half-opens
Beneath me. I am afraid
I walk into the dark night
With no star guide.
The lines mark a return to the dark, natural landscape, but now the speaker is alone.
The final section opens with “Death Knell,” a lamentation and a refusal to believe that the deceased has passed on. The poem personifies pain: “My sadness grows within me / Here is Pain approaching.” As in “Pleasure,” the personification distinguishes this poem. Generally, the poems in the third section are less linear and offer depictions of the grieving process. “For Jacqueline” commemorates Faubert’s daughter, who passed away in infancy: “Speak softly! The little one is dead.” The theme of grief is further reflected in works such as “Nirvana” and “The Empty House,” which lament having to live on without the lost one. “The Tall Chestnut Tree” metaphorically transforms the lost daughter into a struggling sapling, and “The Portrait” deplores the preserved youthfulness of a painting of her daughter. The final poem, “To My Muse,” conflates the three sections into what reads to me as a lamentation that the deceased will never reach the sensuous garden of love that the speaker explored in the first two sections. There is, however, an end to the winter of grief that the speaker experiences:
Smile at the approaching spring, my Muse
Take on the perfumes diffused on the trails
Let your light veil swing over the bushes
And lay your cool hands on the roses
The garden is filled with the perfumes of the love circulated by those who loved the deceased; the roses recall those on which the daughter’s body rested in the fourth stanza of “For Jacqueline.”
Danielle Legros Georges’ fine translations maintain the form of Faubert’s poems, albeit foregoing rhyme. In her translator’s note, Legros Georges explains wanting to preserve the “inherent musicality” of the works and effectively convey Faubert’s “artistic sensibilities.” She also states that she was partially moved to this project by the devastating 2010 earthquake, “a decisive demarcator of Haitian time” (8). This context and the knowledge that Faubert has largely escaped critical attention justifies turning to her work now. As we look forward to a future holding more diversity and representations of marginalized identities, it is important to also look back to artists whose work was ahead of their time. Faubert’s poems, in their representations of female sensuality, love, and loss, voice a humanity that is poignant to a wide audience today. Her imagery holds the attention, asking us to add poetry, too, to the garden of pleasures explored. Nearly a century after its original publication, a skilled translator has brought this poetry to life again, revealing the bicultural, biracial, and possibly bisexual love that it cultivates.
Works Cited
Faubert, Ida. Island Heart. Translated by Danielle Legros Georges, Subpress, 2021.
Mathilda Stock grew up in Toronto, Ontario. She is an undergraduate student at McGill University, where she majors in English literature.
13 June 2023
The Prismatic Spaces between Lines
Review of Gillian Sze, Quiet Night Think
by Mackenzie Pereira
What drives the creative process? To answer this question, Gillian Sze’s newest collection of essays and poems points us skyward to the age-old symbol of the moon. Named in homage of a translation of a famous poem by Li Bai, Quiet Night Think meditates on the nature of liminal spaces, the cycle of life, and the aspects of the human condition that remain culturally immutable.
The life experiences that she has compiled have been chosen with precision. They are all instances of silent growth and are, if one is willing to draw water between words, universal. Sze’s poems are laced with animations of abstractions created by nature, and her essays layer relatable experiences about Canadian immigrant identity.
When the grey rain lingers, go out and buy vegetables./
Handpick lotus roots and winter melon. Drag your brimming
trolley home. (11)
Sze draws inspiration from the scarcity of Chinese poetry. She notes how the spaces between lines are prismatic. “To translate from a language that typically removes articles and pronouns is no simple task” (2). Uncertainty can allow for refraction, for light to be shed on multiple surfaces of thought. The desire for understanding motivates creative thinking; longing carries us from one unknown to the next.
Sze navigates from the subject of writing to yet another creative process: pregnancy.
After giving birth, it is customary in Chinese culture for a woman
to spend one month housebound in order to recover from the
rigours of labour … In my dialect, Hokkien, this practice goes by
another term that translates to “within the month.” My preferred
understanding of this hazy newborn period is that the mother is,
more accurately, “sitting inside the moon.” (37)
As Sze’s priorities soon dissolve in place of those of her newborn, the question arises: do we own our creations, or do they own us? How can distance act as a tether, a lifeline? Autobiographically likening new motherhood to an orbital motion about a planet, Sze writes:
It is a state marked not only by the celestial soothing and nursing
a newborn at all times of the night, but also the sheer lunacy of
those early days. (37)
This collection is an invitation for contemplation. It draws attention to the strength of implicitness, how change – dissolution, even – and the quiet reflection thereafter are essential rituals to make room for creation. Readers looking for a space to reflect will feel at home in the room that Sze has created with her collection.
Sitting in the moon is a transformation. You come out of it no
longer the same person and no longer the same poet. (46)
Works Cited
Sze, Gillian. Quiet Night Think: Poems and Essays. Toronto: ECW Press, 2022.
Mackenzie Pereira is a fourth-year B.Sc. student at McGill University, with a major in Physics and a minor in English Literature. She has completed an internship at CERN (2021), held an NSERC undergraduate research award (2022), and is currently an editor for the McGill Science Undergraduate Research Journal.
31 May 2023
Odes to Mourning Footsteps
Review of Jenny Boychuk, Antonyms for Daughter
by Izzi Holmes
“I have forgiven so much, and still / it’s only morning where I am. / I know nothing yet of afternoons or evenings.” This striking phrase comes from Jenny Boychuk’s “The Long Game” in her 2021 poetry collection Antonyms for Daughter. As the temporal imagery of morning and evening suggests, the collection takes the shape of the mourning process that it broadcasts. Boychuk segments the book into four parts, following grief across the seasons of a year. Though sequential in nature, the poems deviate from linear time to illustrate grief’s unique ability to manifest at any moment, anywhere. The collection includes formal villanelles like “After Life” and the allusive work “The Art of Losing,” as well as free verse and prose poems. Boychuk knots forms together to render the intimate solitude of loss in a universal yet personal manner.
Though Boychuk ensures that within Antonyms for Daughter language functions to make her specific experience accessible, she also proposes language as a tool for processing the complexities of inherited familial legacy. She codifies this lens by attaching symbolic meaning to nouns, beginning each section with “antonym” poems. In “Antonym for Inheritance,” she writes “I died to be my mother’s antonym / but the antonym is never without / that which says you are not me.” Boychuk’s sequencing asserts tension in the speaker’s relationships with both language and her mother. This tension continues in “New Inventory” through the line “Neither antonym nor synonym after all, I put my mother / away, and ask my body to claim its shadow as a part / of the whole.” In these lines, Boychuk employs antonyms as a symbol to engage with the shadow that her mother’s lingering presence casts on her identity. Reflective “antonym” poems frame the reckoning with language and form as real-life concepts and written techniques in the collection.
In “Degrees of Duality,” Boychuk uses strikethroughs as a mode of epanorthosis, physically interrupting the flow of the poem to add dimension to her portrayal of grief. The poem’s discussion of poetry resembles an Ars Poetica, as she mentions constructing odes and elegies: “At seven, I learned the name for an ode elegy, / how its notes cries calmed me like so many hands / polishing tarnishing silverware / no one would ever again raise to their lips.” The pairs of dissonant images call attention to the process of writing poetry. The experiences she renders in her work are poetic before they are poetry, as she explains odes and elegies to be not only a written form, but also a poetic lens to view the world. As a poet, Boychuk sees the world through this poetic lens, then conveys that perspective through written poetry. She makes use of these interruptions to centre the writing process as both a mode for clarifying and complicating these experiences. Boychuk portrays grief and language as gatekeepers of memory, mercilessly exerting influence on the past, present, and future, a narrative perspective that endures across the collection. The collection is about poetry, grief, and language through poetry, grief, and language. Such an artful approach highlights the challenges of rendering grief, specifically navigating the balance between poetic perfectionism and raw emotion.
Elegies and odes return in later poems like “Elegy for What Doesn’t Come” and its antonym, “Elegy for What Does Come,” as Boychuk again uses poetic language to detail complex relationship dynamics. She writes in the former “you write / elegies as she sleeps / above you, / hold your hand / over her mouth each hour / to feel for any strands / of breath.” This comparison endures as the speaker explains how “hours pass / before the light gifts itself / back to you / and you write odes / to her heavy, morning footsteps.” These lines mourn and celebrate a living mother but turn to descriptions of the painful relief that comes when laboured breaths stop and her waking “hour” ends. As forms, elegies and odes are as natural and rhythmic as breathing, but Boychuk illustrates gasps for air to document the less beautiful rhythms of survival. She notes the dimensionality of beginnings and endings, asserting that the two exist as shades of the other, and are worth writing about in the same breath. In “Elegy for What Does Come,” she expands on grief’s relationship to time, writing “you were dead yesterday, too; / if you’re not going to leave, why / don’t you just come inside; / here, I’ve made a pot of coffee; / we’re all still alive.” Boychuk considers suffering as a dimension of solace, framing the magnitude of the monumental as equal to the mundane. By using poetic terminology to categorize grief, Boychuk exemplifies the utter loneliness and total community of both writing and experiencing loss.
Jenny Boychuk’s Antonyms for Daughter looks for ghosts in shadows cast upon the self, exploring both the comforts and perils of feeling haunted. Boychuk navigates the artist’s role in memorializing death while mourning personal loss, posing the summative question “How is it always one thing or and another?” in “Degrees of Duality.” Such a question offers a metaphor for metaphor, the poetic idea that things must stand for one another. She critiques artists for romanticizing death in their art while also documenting a desperate cry to understand the world through that same medium. Boychuk’s work reckons with what to do when words seem insufficient commemoration or revival, though wordsmiths promise a degree of immortality. By working with form and language to render intangible poetry, Boychuk constructs both an elegy and an ode, saying once again grief and poetry are truly “always one thing or and another.”
Works Cited
Boychuk, Jenny. Antonyms for Daughter. Vehicule Press, 2021.
Izzi Holmes grew up in New York and is studying psychology and English literature at McGill University. She is a competitive ice skater and represented Team Canada internationally in synchronized figure skating at the junior level during her second year at McGill.
24 May 2023
Shifting Perspectives of the Pastoral in Karen Solie’s “Mole” and Mark Tredinnick’s “Tereticornis”
by Jackson Pinkowski
The pastoral is a genre which demands rethinking in late modernity. The return to a nature defined by simplicity is a possibility which seems fleeting with the passing of days, and to wholly depict nature in art, one must look further than the shepherd and his love. The desire for a shift in the point of view of the pastoral is reflected in two recent poems by prominent environmentalist writers – “Mole” by Karen Solie and “Tereticornis” by Mark Tredennick. The poems, named after an animal and a plant respectively, are imbued with a keen understanding of the pastoral tradition, making their focus on non-human entities more nuanced and thought-provoking. These urban poets do not long for a simple or singular nature but delve into a specific part of their environment and its dynamism. Each poem carves its respective path through the genre, converging in a similar subject matter and use of figurative language but diverging through varied effects of stanza, sound, and voice. Solie’s “Mole” and Tredinnick’s “Tereticornis” align in subverting the pastoral genre through a change of focus from the human to the non-human but differ in their use of form and technique.
“Mole” and “Tereticornis,” as hinted in their titles, upgrade the genre of the pastoral in focussing not on humans but on plants and non-human animals. Their content is not rooted in the tradition of a passionate shepherd or the naïve urban poet; instead, it is defined by the agency of the non-human. In Solie’s poem, the speaker opposes the mole’s presence, which initially seems to deny this creature its own existence. However, in positioning this animal as an enemy, the speaker affords the mole agency; in the poem, the animal can think, plan, and retaliate. In the first line, one begins to see the power which the mole wields: “Those new flagstones need undermining.” In listing the damage that the mole has or is going to cause in this garden, the speaker creates a series of deliberate actions that this animal inflicts. The choice of “undermining” highlights this: the mole is digging underneath the stone and also generally sabotaging and weakening the power of human impositions upon its environment. The mole is a subject explored much more than any human in the poem. It experiences fear and defeat, followed by revival and victory. Solie creates an animal which is able to act upon humans, just as humans can act upon it – a novel concept to the pastoral. The titular tereticornis of Tredinnick’s poem, meanwhile, is the subject from which the whole poem evolves. The history and ecology of Australia come into focus through the lens of this specific plant – a wildly radical shift of character in pastoral poetry. The agency of the tereticornis is strong in the section of the poem that describes the arrival of settlers: it is “unready / For timber that wanted to splinter so many hopes of hearth and / unhouse so many thoughts of home” (6–8). The tree actively resists the attempts to destroy it and, further, wishes to end the construction of houses. The tereticornis is strong and durable, with wood that is difficult to work, thus being able to thwart both the settlers who wished to build a home and the naïve pastoral poets who are ignorant of the true conditions of the environment. In “Mole” and “Tereticornis,” the animal and the plant are the axis around which the poem revolves, offering a new focus for the often anthropocentric genre of the pastoral.
The first significant way in which the two poems diverge is in the choice of setting. Solie’s “Mole” takes place in a garden, referencing the oft-used pastoral motif of the garden of Eden, the most famous example being Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The garden is transformed into an idyllic representation of nature unspoiled by human sin; however, the poet subverts this pillar of the pastoral by placing it under attack, not by humans but by nature itself. In describing the garden, the speaker offers the reader a glimpse into what this supposed paragon of nature looks like: “the concrete sundial could use a tilt and while he’s at it / he’ll make a disaster of the borders” (2–3). In this instance, the garden is neither a signifier of nature nor is it verily a garden. Instead, the speaker describes a collection of human-made artifacts and concepts that one associates with the so-called garden; nowhere in nature does the “flagstone,” the “sundial,” or the “border” appear. Whereas Solie’s poem takes place in the garden, the setting of Tredinnick’s “Tereticornis” is what is commonly thought of as nature. Most of the Australian coast is a prime example of what many view as an unspoiled wilderness, a repeatedly imagined space in the pastoral genre. However, Tredinnick, too, finds a way to write an ecosystem not fit for simple and singular categorization. The speaker commends the tereticornis for being able to prosper in its environment, which he describes as a “slow-tempered place on earth” (15). The adjective used to describe this location has its root in the verb “to temper,” signifying the way in which the ecosystem heats and dries to an extreme and then cools. Conversely, this adjective points to a noun, the temper which belongs to the land and imbues it with a certain harshness. Either way one interprets “slow-tempered,” the result is the same: Tredinnick represents an ecosystem neither simplistic nor naively pleasant. Solie and Tredinnick place their poems in iconic yet different settings of the pastoral genre and subvert them, creating environments not solely interested in the human but in plants and animals too.
The stanza form is an exciting aspect of both poems due to their lack of adherence to any one kind in particular.While there are fleeting moments of metre, the two are written in free verse with no consistent rhyme scheme. The way in which Tredinnick arranges the poem, with continuing varied indentations, creates a unique shape and transforms the beginnings and ends of lines into a series of protruding horns, invoking the image of the titular plant. The tereticornis, the poem’s namesake, was given its epithet due to the sharp covering of its flower, teret meaning cylindrical and cornis, in Latin, horn. Dually, the juts that the stanza forms make one recall the hills and ridges upon which the tree sits. It is also possible that this serpentine form is supposed to invoke the river of the “flooded redgum,” another name for the tereticornis (1). In shifting the indentations of the poem, Tredinnick creates a stanza which makes the reader question not only the ways in which poetry captures nature but also the ways in which nature shapes poetry. The form of Solie’s “Mole,” on the other hand, is a single unbroken stanza of eighteen lines. This straightforward and clinical approach to the stanza form reflects the ideals of the speaker. It does not inspire the image of nature as “Tereticornis” does, but rather reminds the reader of the artifice of the garden; a clean line runs down the edge of the poem. However, every line of the poem is enjambed, this pattern ending only in the penultimate line. Only at the end of the poem, once the mole has had its victory over human order, is a feeling of continuity or completion created. Using stanza in two innovative and distinct ways, Solie and Tredinnick show how the form can be used to represent nature in the pastoral genre.
The use of sound is another point where the two poems differ, particularly in the device of alliteration. In “Mole,” there is a striking use of consonance, whereas in “Tereticornis,” it is assonance which is most compelling. The tone of cold sterility which marks the poetic voice of “Mole” proliferates in the poem’s sound. For instance, the speaker describes the mole as “polydactylic and psychoanalytically proportioned” (11). The repeated voiceless consonants (hard “c” and “t”) create a staccato sound, which reminds the reader of the harshness and hostility that the speaker has towards the mole, and the two adjectives are far too rational and cerebral to fit the mole. In “Tereticornis,” assonance is used all throughout the poem, lightening it. While Solie’s alliteration divided the line into harsh consonants, Tredinnick’s assonance creates unity within the passage, leading the reader from one word to the next: “Above the farm they found arrayed around the bay” (Tredinnick 9-10). The short and long “a” sounds remind the audience of the lasting beauty of the tereticornis. Despite the incursion of “farm,” one of the only words that does not fit into this repetition of vowels, the landscape’s effect is still felt. In Solie’s use of consonance, the reader can see anthropocentric thought sharply dividing human from nature, while Tredinnick’s unifying assonance conveys the strengths of a pastoral genre with nature as its focus.
The two speakers, who narrate “Mole” and “Tereticornis,” respectively, introduce two new voices into the pastoral genre. As mentioned previously, the speaker of “Mole” is remarkable in the distaste expressed towards the titular creature; the thinking is purely constructed around the frameworks of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. The speaker can only describe the actions of the mole through the language of a middle-class human life. This is plainly seen when she states that when the mole “comes of age, he’ll rejoin his live / work situation as a manager and sole proprietor of our old estate” (15-18). This characterization of the mole makes it a human-like creature ruled by the same abstract cultural concepts as a man, an idea that is completely false. Even the animal’s own name invites the speaker’s anthropomorphic gaze. The mole becomes an undercover intelligence officer plotting the speaker’s downfall. The anthropomorphism of the speaker ironically calls attention to her inability to look outside a human and Western framework. The speaker of “Tereticornis,” by contrast, is the opposite of Solie’s. This voice has a keen understanding of the flora belonging to the land. It engages in a similar, albeit tamer, anthropomorphism to that used in “Mole” but results in a wildly different effect. The speaker describes the tereticornis scratching “with long fingers across the blue back of the sky” or even as “a mob / Of them, a mnemonic chorus-line, genies of the place” (3, 10-11). Although the plant is described by human descriptors, it animates and creates nuance rather than simplicity or cliché. The speaker of the poem adheres to an animism that views all things, despite their material differences, with the same interior existence, making them animated and alive. This would describe why the trees can exhibit these human traits and actions, as they too are subjects. The speaker’s sensitivity to indigenous life is also reflected in the tereticornis’ ability “to prosper through six / Seasons yearly” (14-15). This passage may puzzle Western readers regarding the additional number of seasons; however, the six-season calendar is the standard for many indigenous tribes of Australia, being able to represent its dry and wet seasons more accurately (Government of Australia). In the anthropocentric poetic persona of “Mole” Solie satirizes the traditional speaker of the pastoral, whereas Tredinnick offers a potential replacement in the animistic and indigenous.
In depicting the return to ideal simplicity through nature, the pastoral genre often turns nature into nothing more than a simplistic ideal. Poets Karen Solie and Mark Tredinnick have discovered this flaw within nature writing, and their works seek to correct its course. Though the poems “Mole” and “Tereticornis” take different approaches, whether it be varied use of stanza and sound or wildly different speakers, they arrive at the same goal; that is the refocusing of the pastoral back upon the environment and the plants and animals that inhabit it.
Works Cited
Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology. “Indigenous Weather Knowledge.” D’harawal Calendar - Indigenous Weather Knowledge, 2016, http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/dharawal.shtml
Karen Solie “Mole.” The Norton Anthology Poetry, W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 2147.
Mark Tredinnick. “Tereticornis.” Walking Underwater, World Square, Australia, Pitt Street Poetry, 2021, p. 70
Jackson Pinkowski was born and raised in Toronto. He is an undergraduate student at McGill University majoring in English literature and Russian studies.
Canadian Ecopoetics: The Paradox of Language
by Mackenzie Pereira
Throughout his collection of poems, Don McKay suggests that there are inherent limitations to language, and that they constrain the articulation of nature and natural history. In his preface to Angular Unconformity, McKay defines the geological term titling his book as “a border between two rock sequences, one lying at a distinct angle to the other, which represents a significant gap – often millions of years – in the geological record” (“A Note on the Title” 9). Accordingly, nature and the human lexicon are implied as two rock sequences lying at angles to each other, vanishing history at their intersection. McKay’s poetry will be oriented within the genre of Canadian ecopoetry using George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls and Sky Dancer / Louise B. Halfe’s Bear Bones & Feathers as context. Clarke’s and Halfe’s poetry reveal how Canadian literary frameworks ill-accomodate the narratives of minority groups. Their works insist on an interconnectedness between the cultural histories of Black and Indigenous people, respectively, and Canadian landscapes. Therefore, the difficulty in expressing cultural truths is directly reflective of a difficulty in expressing truths of nature. This essay will examine all three works in the lens of American literary critic Lawrence Buell’s first tenet of ecopoetry: “The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history” (Buell 7). As McKay wrestles with the indirectness of metaphor and the anthropocentricity of names, a paradox begins to take shape within the ecopoetic agenda: language is vital to describe the essence of nature, yet simultaneously insufficient.
Metaphors are paradoxical because they describe a subject by describing something that the subject is not. They can be thought of as “a breaking and a joining – a hinge” (Dickinson 36). A fascination with the circuitousness of metaphor is a theme that often arises in McKay’s poetry when he attempts to describe nature. He deliberates “The struggle of language with itself, its sojourn in the wilderness” (“Muskwa Assemblage” 480), exposing an incompatibility between the two. McKay remarks how the beauty of nature inspires him to “Write it down,” but language’s insufficiency makes him “Cross it out” (“Muskwa Assemblage” 480). As Adam Dickinson explains in his article on lyric ethics, “the nonhuman is approached through anthropomorphism as a kind of material metaphoricity, as a thing that is contingently cast in the structures of a logic that is always insufficient” (45). McKay exposes how language does not permit the description of nature without relating it to human experiences. He does this by describing clouds as “dangerous brains” (“Big Alberta Clouds” 328) and a caribou as “a waiter carrying a tray of silence” (“Muskwa Assemblage” 480). McKay even seems to directly attack punctuation, the party whip of language, as he describes antlers as “improbable parentheses” (“Muskwa Assemblage” 480) and the route of a creek as passing “between quotation marks” (“Inhabiting the Map” 250). He indicates an intersection in language where neither the literal nor the fantastical are adequate descriptors of the natural world.
Ecopoetry, among many benefits, offers readers a sense of place so that they feel connected to the landscape. However, in insisting that there remains something untranslatable about nature, McKay is encouraging readers to experience it for themselves. Although humanity’s words are still naive and ill-encompassing, being forced to confront this fact can be humbling and therapeutic. McKay writes that “It’s OK to disappear” (“Finger Pointing at the Moon” 418) because in order to obtain clarity, often old words must “be lost forever, then come back / as beach glass, polished” (“Finger Pointing at the Moon” 418). Appreciation for the natural world still exists within onlookers even if it cannot be recorded. D.M.R. Bentley, in his book The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897, explains that it is “a common experience that certain scenery has a tendency to lift us out of our habitual condition” (177). By highlighting the limits of metaphor, McKay implies that nature possesses a wisdom that humans can learn from, but not imitate.
Experiencing wordlessness in nature is especially important when considering how the wrong words can often undo or invalidate certain experiences. Much how bioregionalism insists on designating geographical areas for nature to thrive, George Elliott Clarke carves out spaces for Black narratives within Canadian poetry. Whylah Falls is a “collection of poems, prose paragraphs, letters, photographs and fictionalized newspaper clippings” (Wells 1). This quilt of art forms shows that no singular pre-existing literary medium is alone sufficient to portray the essence of Black Nova Scotia. Clarke uses the character Othello Clemence to illustrate how racial injustice is often erased from history because it is not given a voice. When Othello is fatally assaulted and shot, “His history / … / stops on bloodied gravel / While silence whines in the legislature” (“The Lonesome Death of Othello Clemence” 118). The crime of racism is multifarious; it is more than the murderous action itself. Systemic oppression disallows productive steps toward progress because it does not acknowledge any wrongdoing. Clarke writes: “The sound of the blast ricochets later in unexpected places. It is heard when S.S.S. is acquitted of the murder charge” (“The Argument” 107). Clarke’s story emphasizes how the colonial-centric state of Canadian literature prevents Black Canadians from seeing their lineage reflected in their country’s biography. Language has the power to define an individual’s worldview, since “everyone uses words to create a truth he or she can trust and live within” (“The Argument” 24).
Black history and the environment are interconnected, as seen by how Clarke uses figurative language to depict food and music. Descriptions of Cora’s “Jarvis County Cuisine” (“How to Live in the Garden” 48) are infused with nature and locally sourced ingredients, demonstrating how natural resources have influenced and enhanced African-Canadian cuisine. Her gumbo is a “miniature sea” and her dandelion wine tastes like “sunlight shining through birch leaves.” Mealtimes bring people together as Cora intones that “The table is a community.” The dishes themselves are vestiges of Cora’s ancestors. She cooks using “the salty recipes of Fundy Acadians” which consider “the starchy diets of South Shore Loyalists, and the fishy tastes of Coloured Refugees.” In Dorothy Wells’ A Rose Grows in Whylah Falls, she writes that “Cora’s cooking is her way of making love, her art, her poetry” (63). With this in mind, Clarke’s description of Cora’s cookbook as a “private bible” (“How to Live in the Garden” 48) emphasizes how history, cuisine, and community are spiritually connected.
Another facet of Clarke’s poetry relates nature with music and history. Pablo’s instrument is a “river guitar” (“Revolutionary Epoch” 119) and Pushkin’s notes are “luscious fruit, heavy with memory and tears” (“Four Guitars” 109). Music is a way for Black Canadians to preserve their narratives. In fact, the souls of many of Clarke’s characters are linked to different instruments through which their voice can be heard. When Othello dies, “his guitar must be splintered upon a rock, freeing the twenty-four pale butterflies trapped behind the strings” (“The Argument” 107). This represents how the memory of Othello’s life is transformed into nature. Because systemic racial oppression often prevents the stories of African-Canadians from being told, validated, and remembered, such transformations are important because they assure a type of authentic preservation within the land. When “Shelley plots a miniature orchard” (“The Argument” 161) at the end of the book, she displays an environmentalism that is culturally motivated. Even if certain experiences are not represented in history books, the land will preserve true events and inform future generations.
Adjacently, Louise B. Halfe’s dissatisfaction with the English language is evidenced in her poetry book Bear Bones & Feathers through her addition of Cree words. Many of her poems are titled in Cree, for example “pâhkahkos” (8) or “nîcimos” (68), instead of English. Additionally, as seen in the first line of her opening poem when Halfe writes “I sleep with sihkos” (“Bone Lodge” 1), Halfe often uses Cree words to describe concepts relating to nature. Words in Cree usually have “nested meanings” (Van Essen 71) that are implied based on context and possess cultural and philosophical connotations. Much of the English vocabulary has developed without attention to Indigenous ideologies. As a result, Halfe cannot authentically describe her journey and identity using English alone. In a review of Halfe’s poetry, University of Alberta professor Angela Van Essen maintains that “in order to understand this book on a deeper level, readers must pay close attention to the nêhiyaw itwêwina (the Cree words) that Louise Halfe uses in her poetry, because these words are deeply rooted in nêhiyaw laws, histories, sacred stories, and ceremonies” (71). A bi-linguistic approach allows “[Halfe’s] people’s history, culture, and spirituality [to] infuse [her] poetics, while remaining universal to our shared human history” (“Foreword” xi).
Further, Halfe shows that her culture is tied to her reserve landscape through depictions of Cree rituals and Indigenous herbal remedies. Medicine that has been made using natural resources is an example of how the landscape can offer physical remediation. Halfe describes the “carrot roots, yarrow, camomile, rat-root, and câhcâmosikan” (“Medicine Bear” 14) which hang in her nôhkom’s workspace. Much like Cora’s cooking, these recipes have been passed down for generations. Since herbs are locally sourced, the upkeep of the surrounding environment is essential to the preservation of Indigenous methods of healing. On the other hand, the landscape can also contribute to spiritual restoration. Halfe describes how traditional dancing brings people closer to the wilderness to form a “beating common lung” (“Spirits” 7). In the poem Bone Lodge, the sweat lodge ceremony that is described is achieved by using natural resources such as rocks, saplings, and water. Purification rituals can remind people of their connection with nature and the land. During this ceremony, Halfe reflects:
I’m meat and bones,
dust and straw,
caterpillars and ants,
hummingbird and crow. (“Bone Lodge” 3)
The anaphora throughout this poem implies that healing and spirituality must be re-examined and maintained repeatedly throughout one's life. Naturally, this can only be made possible if the environment itself is likewise cared for.
Indigenous beliefs emphasize the idea that people’s spirits, through death, transform into the landscape. Halfe’s late nimosôm “bathes in sage or cedar, / sweating through breathing rocks” (“He Has Gone to Ground” 25). In another instance, Halfe’s mother tells her, referring to a nearby creek, that “[her late] Grandma lives in that water” (Grandma’s Apprentice” 22). The present tense for both “bathes” and “lives” imply that her grandparents have not gone, but still exist in an unseen way. Halfe describes her ancestors as eternally present “in the hills / … / laughing the dark” (“Ghost Dance” 2). Her ancestors remain capable of animating the night through knowing laughter, and their “shattered bones” have become the rustling, “clattering” wind. This poem implies that not only are her ancestors preserved in nature, but they are also responsible for creating it. Indigenous beliefs centre around an active history, one that can be found within a land that is alive and dynamic.
In a similar vein, and in consideration of nature’s intricate mysticism, it is reductive to name and compartmentalize landscapes to suit human needs. Geographical demarcations are imposed by humans for convenience, but in truth, the environment is all-spanning. In part one of McKay’s Inhabiting the Map, a body of water is referred to as “Waterbed King” (250). This name perverts the organicism of the river with ideas of commercialism. It is a satirical criticism of how humans are losing the ability to appreciate nature without implicating their own consumer-mindset. According to McKay, the human compulsion to brand landscapes is derived from the need to “satisfy some primal urge in a hyperlinguistic species like ours” (“Muskwa Assemblage” 485). Language is described as a possessive imposition that crams the infinite complexity of the environment into a few words with few connotations: “Nameless mountains, nameless creeks: language abhors such vacuums” (“Muskwa Assemblage” 485).
Naming something implies ownership or creative credit. However, nature predates human existence and, as advocated in Clarke’s and Halfe’s poetry, quite informs culture and identity. It is in reflecting about how he has been shaped by his environment that McKay “contemplate[s] the reverse of paternalistic and colonial nomination” (“Muskwa Assemblage” 485) and instead “imagine[s] being named by a place” (“Muskwa Assemblage” 485). Clarke goes one step further than simply thinking about such a name-reversal when he, in the skin of his character X, refers to Whylah Falls as “Sunflower County” (“Each Moment Is Magnificent” 41). Halfe herself, ahead of McKay, is rather literally named Sky Dancer. It is likely, then, in the spirit of compromise that McKay chose to name the collection of his life’s work after an attribute of the land that inspired it. Nonetheless, the irony still remains that the term “angular unconformity” is etymologically human.
Canadian language and literature are predominantly colonial-centric and ill-equipped to reflect the narratives of minority groups. Louise B. Halfe’s poetry illustrates how Indigenous culture becomes heritage by means of nature. Her bilingualism indicates that Cree words have connotations that better describe nature because of the way Indigenous culture is linked to the environment. George Elliott Clarke’s book steps up to fill a lacuna in Canadian literature. From food to music, and from nature to politics, Clarke emphasizes that the details of the African-Canadian experience are all intricately connected. By showing how their respective histories have evolved with the land, Halfe and Clarke leverage culture as a motive for environmentalism. Finally, Don McKay’s collected poems reflect on his impressions from nature. He figures that some scenery simply cannot be conveyed through the use of metaphor or encapsulated in a name. This failure to articulate means that some of nature’s power will be lost from written history. However, it can still certainly be experienced in the present by those who are willing to listen to the environment. The works of these three ecopoets agree that the land contains history, mystic knowledge, and beauty. They describe the earth as a force that inspires and absolves the cycle of life; Natural history is directly implicated in human history. We see this when Halfe writes:
I am gone
into the wilderness
of the sweat,
bleeding
Rock.
(“ayamihâwina―Old Rock Mother” 3)
And when Clarke writes: “We were born of the stars/ that fell on Nova Scotia” (“Absolution” 175). And when McKay writes: “Blood bone flesh weather water make/ a man” (“Drinking Lake Superior” 249). Although language constrains these poets in different ways, perhaps a better picture of Canada’s ecology can be appreciated when their works are considered side by side.
Mackenzie Pereira is a fourth-year B.Sc. student at McGill University, with a major in Physics and a minor in English Literature. She has completed an internship at CERN (2021), held an NSERC undergraduate research award (2022), and is currently an editor for the McGill Science Undergraduate Research Journal.
Works Cited
Bentley, D.M.R. “Therapeutic Nature.” The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897 (chapter 5), University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp.117-203.
Buell, Lawrence. Introduction. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995, pp.1-27.
Dickinson, Adam. “Lyric Ethics: Ecocriticism, Material Metaphoricity, and the Poetics of Don McKay and Jan Zwicky.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, vol. 55, 2004, pp.34-52.
Wells, Dorothy. “A Rose Grows in Whylah Falls: Transplanted Traditions in George Elliott Clarke’s ‘Africadia.’” Canadian Literature, vol. 155, 1997, pp. 56-73.
Van Essen, Angela. “Bending, Turning, and Growing: Cree Language, Laws, and Ceremony in Louise B. Halfe/Sky Dancer’s The Crooked Good.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 30, no. 1, 2018, pp. 71-93.
Music That Will Save Them
It all begins with an idea.
Review of Fluid Vessels 5, a Poetry Reading by Lorna Goodison, Tanure Ojaide, and Mark Tredinnick
by Lizzie Schulz and Savannah Sguigna
The fifth installment of Fluid Vessels, the poetry reading series of the Montreal International Poetry Prize, took place online on 2 May 2022. Lorna Goodison, judge of the 2022 competition, as well as two members of the jury, Tanure Ojaide and Mark Tredinnick, read several poems from their recent collections.
Goodison’s poetry reverberates with feminine inspiration. Her feminism extends beautifully to the very way in which she describes her poetic technique. In the Q&A session, she likened the constraints of poetic form to swaddling a baby: the form provides the poem its structure, but it should not bind the poem too tightly.
In Mother Muse, Goodison draws attention to the versatility of women. She pays close attention to Sister Mary Ignatius, a remarkable woman who ran the Alpha Boys School in Jamaica. In her position, Sister Ignatius unconventionally taught her students how to box and to play jazz. In “Sister Iggy Deejay,” we see her substituting trumpets and vinyl records for Bibles: “Instruments of brass range row on row / on wooden shelves planed by apprentices. / She has dispatched two of the Alpha boys / to Times Store to buy hot 45’s heard on radio … She helped to make them into men who make / music that will save them.”
Tanure Ojaide followed Goodison’s lyrical work with his contemplations of history and place. He led the audience into a heightened awareness of society, land, and political conditions in his native Nigeria. His works, such as “Remembering (For Ezekiel),” reflect the interconnectedness of all life, inviting the listener to consider the ways in which we respond to trauma in parallel with the earth itself: “The day the farmer lost all his harvest to locusts … The days the news trashed the minstrel.” His final piece of the reading, “If Only They Knew,” satirically contrasted the fleeting fervor of soccer fans with the cries of enslaved peoples from the present and the past.
Mark Tredinnick likewise invokes human responsibility in his environmental poems, which reflect the ecology of Australia. Tredinnick’s work beholds the land as a space of renewal. His opening poem, “Sometimes Peace,” was featured as an accompaniment to an art installation, titled “Shorelines,” which remembers the Tasmanian involvement in the Armistice of the First World War: “You fooled yourself you went / For fun; you said you went for Empire, for Honour, / For six weeks tops. It was for years; for some, it was / For keeps. For war will maim or murder no matter // Why you think you go.” All three poets evoked images of peace, violence, and hope in ways that returned again and again to the fertility and fragility of the earth.
To experience the full meaning and depth of these poets’ works, the Montreal Prize encourages you to obtain a copy of their books: Lorna Goodison, Mother Muse; Tanure Ojaide, Love Gifts; Mark Tredinnick, Walking Underwater. Also, stay tuned for the next Fluid Vessels readings in the coming year.
In the words of the 2022 prize director, Eli MacLaren, the Montreal Prize is meant to be “a glass case in which the gift of poetry can be housed for the world to see.” As poets and applicants expectantly await the results of 2022 competition, we invite you to read the best poetry that you can lay your hands on along with us.
27 May 2022