The Last Three Poetry Books of my Year

I’ve felt blissfully on top of new poetry for a change, though of course even the 40 or so volumes I’ve read this year are a tiny fraction of what’s happening out there. I’d hoped that total immersion in the craft would get my own juices rolling, but this year I have not been able to write poetry or to paint. I’ve managed several short stories, though, a genre I’d like to work more in, and I’ve been writing about food, mood, and books like mad, so I won’t complain. That said, next year I am switching up my focus a bit to try to cajole the poetic and the painterly muse back into mind. I can’t really live for long without the image-oriented muse.

Still, it can be intimidating to try to harness that muse when you’re holding something like Sue Sinclair’s Breaker in your hand. I wonder often whether the world really needs any more poetry, but then I read something like this, and know we can’t live without. We sleep side by side with eternity, and never touch, she writes. Birds that fly into that eternity- they are “chips of bone in the sky.”

Here’s a few lines from Portugal Cove, Night, that express something perfect that I’ve never been able to.

Shivering, you realize he’s the one
you’ve called on to keep chaos at bay-
how foolish you were.

Using nature to describe the nature of the heart is the oldest trick in the book, yet Sue manages somehow to make it all fresh, waves, stars, trees and all, as if the world itself was new and just unfolding. Breaker is her fourth book and I’ll be looking for the first three. Even their titles are poems of their own: The Drunken Lovely Bird, Secrets of Weather and Hope.

Like Sue, David O’Meara has also been shortlisted for a variety of prestigious awards, and he won the Archibald Lampman award in 2004. His third collection, Noble Gas, Penny Black is the kind of book you should read in a bar with a notebook open, scrawled thoughts littering page after page You read, you muse, you swig, you jot things down. You wish you smoked again, so that you could occasionally fumble for matches, or lean to the guy at the table next to you and say, “Got a light? Hey listen to this:”

Arriving here, across the blue sheet
at the inside of your thigh:
that supple groove

or

The sandwich was crap, the tea
magnificent

then,

the air all Bogart
with smoke and goodbyes.

John Donlan’s Spirit Engine is the last book of poetry I will read this year, so I leap right into the last lines as if to read my fortune for the next year.

yet once there wasn’t a single living thing
on earth: chemicals, complex mixes, lightning, and
something began remaking itself, stubborn,
creeping like happiness across the landscape.

Perhaps it’s cheating to sneak a peek at endings, to skim poems, or chew them, or reread them over and over, or perhaps that’s how you are supposed to experience a book, sprinting through the pages that aren’t relevant today but might be tomorrow. If the end is most important today, then a beginning may be more important tomorrow.

Regardless of the correct literary protocol, of the poet’s chronology here (John dates each poem, and they go in order), you’ll need to, want to, go through and ruminate and ponder. Donlan lives surrounded by Ontario wilderness, and you’ll want to pack this volume when you go canoeing, read it by a campfire, reflect on nature’s serenity and calamity with the poet while in its midst.

You can sing about the rain, he writes, but it won’t do a damn bit of good.

Oh, but it will. Another song about the rain, another poem about the sea. There is nothing new under the sun, oh, no, and so what flows out of my pen won’t exactly won’t shatter the earth with originality. We write of rain, of love, of eternity, same as all the poets before us, and those yet to follow. What is the meaning of this? Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps, as John writes, Birds repeat their parents’ songs as if their lives depend on it.

Lana R. Castle’s Finding Your Bipolar Muse

It’s debatable what’s worse in living la vida bipolar- the endless darkness that can snatch you out of the game of living, either literally or figuratively, or the clean up of debris and loss left over from euphoria’s lies, where any number of inexplicable life choices ‘seemed like a good idea at the time.’

artist not known-if it's you please let me know!

But unequivocally, what’s best about our wild heart is the flood of creativity. Even if manic artists do tend to start a lot of projects they will never finish, they also finish a lot more projects than the average joe. The lives of many of us were quite brief- Mozart comes to mind, as does Marilyn Monroe- but the body of amazing work is staggering. While mania has it’s own disasters, I for one believe the greatest risk is not taking one, and without all the ‘truth or dare’ that the manic mind inspires, the world would be short of art and books and operas and religions and films and so on. Inside that hurricane of ideas, there are bad ideas, and unfinished ideas, but there are stunning ideas that we see through to fruition eventually, ideas that change the world or make it more beautiful. Finding Your Bipolar Muse: How to Master Depressive Droughts and Manic Floods and Access Your Creative Power is a blessing on paper from writer Lana R. Castle. If all those other self-help books on organizing your time ended up in a tangled tower in an unused closet, recycle them. They aren’t written for you. This one is. Lana understands your secret fears of losing the best part of yourself- your creativity- and from the inside out, she knows how to preach organization to the scattered, excited, amazing mind. She gives helpful solutions for prioritizing creative output, harnessing the best of it, letting go of guilt for what’s not finished, and explaining how we work to family and friends who just don’t get it. She won’t scare you away with impossible structures, but does give hints on how to let a little structure work wonders for you. She listens carefully to what you might give up, and then weighs in on what you might gain from those sacrifices. She addresses the fear of medication eating up the best part of our lives, without pushing the issue, showing that some pharmaceutical tweaking may leverage the worst depression, freeing that time up for creation. If your medication has already made you dead, she urges you to go back to your doctor and discuss your birthright- a variety of moods and a creative spirit. Best of all, Lana holds our hand through scary stuff we don’t know how to do. For all the brazen bravado of the best days, I can sometimes flip my lid completely because I don’t know how to fill out a g.d. form and no one is explaining it right. There are abundant tips and techniques for where, what, who, why and when, all things that can help us get set up. If creating inspires you, but managing your creation- you know, project management, keeping invoices, etc, terrifies you- Lana’s breezy, assertive, yes-you-can is infectious and practical. And while the book reads back to back, it’s written with the bipolar mind in mind. Lana knows we are extremely bright, despite our wandering attention spans. So the chapters and sections are short and smart, spliced with quotes and stories from other creatives, charts and sidebars, and point form lists where relevant. There are other books about the crazy/creative connection, but this one breaks ground because it blends philosophical musing with pragmatic ways to harness and honour the best part of your life. Lana knows we may be prone to thinking we can do a year-long project in three days- and that on another occasion, we may feel crippling inadequacy and be unable to complete basic, routine tasks. Imagine merging those polar opposites- not into a flat line, but an ‘upper middle.’ Going past your fears of incapability, seeing reasonably the time constraints. The result? A completed project, newfound real confidence, and a head still whirling with awesome ideas. Don’t miss out on this helpful guide. Lorette C. Luzajic of The Girl Can Write writes two other blogs, including The Literary Addict (literaryaddict.wordpress.com) and Fascinating People: Gossip for Smart People (fascinatingpeople.wordpress.com). A spin-off column, Fascinating Writers, appears monthly in Book Slut magazine. She is also the Spice Girl columnist and food writer for Gremolata.com, the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, and is about to release not one but three new books. She is also a mixed-media artist. Visit all of these through www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The Toronto Quarterly

The Toronto Quarterly is a brand new literary journal for Toronto’s vibrant and varied lit scene.

The first issue is out, and features poets like John Dorsey, A.D. Winans, Penn Kemp, Geraldine Green, Desi Dinardo, R.D. Armstrong, Melanie Pierluigi, Jim Johnstone, and, of course, me- Lorette C. Luzajic.

Edited by Darryl Salach, who will cheerfully consider your best original work for the second issue.

Send your work to thetorontoquarterly@hotmail.com. You can order the handsome journal for about fifteen bucks.