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.

Reading S.E. Venart’s Woodshedding

You aren’t expecting the poet to talk about Peaches, known for such musical subtleties as Fuck the Pain Away. You aren’t expecting to go outdoors, leaping with goats, like Heidi, or to be hallowed by hope.

You aren’t expecting most of S.E. Venart’s surprises. They are as startling and stunning as fresh, crisp autumn apples.

It took me a few months to get to my commentary, and I felt guilty for taking my time with the poet’s first collection, from Brick Books, called Woodshedding. But I suspect she wouldn’t want me to hurry. Woodshedding is many things to the poet, including the solitary and arduous practice of jazz musicians, their spontaneous singing. It is also about writing alone, in a “Waldenesque environment,” the author says on her website, woodshedding.org. And so I imagine my reading was as the writer intended it to be, after all is said and done, flipping to random pages during rare solitude, carefully brewing ginger tea and sipping it from tiny goblets.

Indeed, despite every effort, “we still can’t save each other/ instead, we drink pot after pot of tea,” Venart muses. These small rituals, the pouring of hot water, the sounding out of words, make scars from wounds, and ordinary, specific joys out of chaos and upheaval.

Try this morsel, from Postcard to You.

Since I came back, my days
so thin, barely there: Peaches,
the burlesque queen of techno-
punk’s in town. Tonight,
I could go see her but the urge
is just a tip
of all that’s wrong with me.

Forget all the poetry you’ve read before, either to bored tears for its stuffy irrelevance, or to the head-scratching disbelief over greeting card schmaltz. Venart’s gift at conveying the quiet textures of everyday life with the magic of words is quite different from anyone else. The poems, and the playful exploration of the theme of ‘woodshedding,’ evoke all the surprise and pleasure at words found in e. e. cummings, or indeed, in fridge magnet poetry, yet they are honed, with chance a kind of chosen element, hardly random.  They have a playful feeling of discovery, yet they mirror our deepest emotions, pull up the fragmented parts or our lives we’ve never found the words for ourselves.

Anyone who has grieved will find resonance in Edison, in following Venart through her kitchen, “not wanting hunger, but faced all the same with its pain.” A pear, half an orange, a graying fig become a detailed landscape where the emptiness is shiny and stark. “It was hope with a twist. I wanted you not gone./ I imagined you netted, pulled back from ether or domed/ In still life, caught in the grid-work of clouds.”
Then the poet steers us deep into childhood, making jam and wax handprints with Mom. “We don’t talk about the days you didn’t get up,” she begins. Then later in the poem, celebrates the wax, “preserving our smallness to hang on strings, now fading in the kitchen window.” She surmises that throughout these days on Varsity Drive, “Sometimes we were good enough to trick you out of sadness.”

But as in William Carlos’ Williams ice cold plums, it is in the kitchen where my favourite piece by this poet takes place. Each of us has likely experienced firsthand the traumatic consequences of doing the dishes, whether we have been the martyred dish-doer, rightfully nagging for a bit of effing help at the sink, or the one who rushes off after filling her stomach, forgetting that sustenance and pleasure require some sacrifice from somebody. Nothing, not adultery or dirty laundry has as much volatility as the damn dishes do, and yet until this day I know of no one who could capture the essence of this quotidian drama in a perfect poem. “I missed my chance to be graceful,” the narrator laments in Escape. “Instead, I left you with the dishes.” Roaming outdoors, searching for the goat “who’d eloped into the clover,” she frolics with Timothy in the “lofty dusk” against a landscape of jagged pines. As the  “first stars pricked their sharp time into mine,” the poet recalls the task she has abandoned.

Finally, it must be noted that there are little windows behind the details. Like the continual resurfacing of the title’s random complexities, each detail has more than one face. Take the opening quote by Ernest Oberholtzer, an American conservationist, as a tour guide through Venart’s stories. “I want to see everything,” he says. “I don’t care how hard it is.”

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

In Which the Author Reads Some Poetry: Daughters of Men by Brenda Leifso

The gods infuse everything, from history to popular culture, but the last thing anybody wants is yet another book of quasi-intellectual mythology-based poems. Or, like the blurb warns, another book of ‘unflinching honesty’ where the ‘mundane becomes mythic…the ordinary, extraordinary.’ And while the editor slash professor circles may wonder what a plebian like myself could know of scholarly poetry, I stand firmly half ‘of the people’ and half well-read, adequately educated poet, knowing my voice actually counts for a great deal more than the dusty, dismal, dismissed volumes of poetry no one ever read. Or ever will.

For all these reasons, I cringe when picking up Daughters of Men, by Brenda Leifso, a Calgary poet who worked as executive editor of PRISM international. The titles promise me the kind of convoluted mythology I’m hoping to avoid: Dionysus’ Seduces Pentheus and Sends Him in the Guise of a Woman to Hunt Agave. But flipping through, as the words begin to reach through my defenses, I begin softening. What other language but the stories of the gods can we use to talk about incest? How else but through the imagery of other women silenced can a soul unveil the broken wings that it is made of?

I found some of the language stunning: “a dark panic of wings,” “summer ochre in his hair.” I found some of the revelations astute: “I’m getting tired of blaming my mother./It seems I can’t write a poem without lying.” Then there’s the symbolic invention of Silenae, a character in Leifso’s interpretative The Theban Women, a long poem central to Daughters of Men. I’m connecting the name of this character, who did not officially occur in Euripides’ The Bacchae, to the word “silence,” interpreting it as a character for the silenced ones. Leifso writes that in early Greek society, baby daughters were carried into the hills to die. She envisions Silenae this way: “What might happen to one, a wild creature, who managed to live?”

This brings vivid life to girls and women who have suffered incredible atrocities, those who have not been able to speak. Wives, sisters, and daughters of men. I recall a heartbreaking conversation, years ago, with a woman who had been sexually abused by her stepfather. She said that while her childhood was traumatic, she couldn’t really dwell on it, that sexual abuse was so commonplace that it was practically a ‘rite of passage for girls.’ Indeed, it seems far more taboo to speak about it than to do it, as if we should protect the perpetrators and shroud them in secrecy. Then we act as if the victim, too, has something to hide.

Here, Leifso, who has a few poetry awards under her belt, including the Bliss Carman Banff Centre Award For Poetry, refuses this silence. Leifso writes eloquently on behalf of daughters of men, yesterday and today, who have suffered in silence. I found that at times the poetry sounded forced and self-conscious, like it was trying too hard. But the poems also ignite the imagination and recover for daughters everywhere a small sliver of lost light.

Daughters of Men
Brenda Leifso
Brick Books, 2008

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Lorette is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Her work has appeared in White Wall Review, Quarry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Rattle, Modern Poetry, Book Slut, and more.