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 Reading the Bible Backwards Backwards

There were a lot of surreal things about the Robert Priest reading at the Dora Keogh last night. Not the least of which, the pub did not stock Bombay Sapphire.

I had to settle for Tanqueray. Women of a certain age can be rather fussy about their gin, darling, though I admit it’s unlikely I’d do well in a blind taste test. Still, there’s a great deal  to be said for blue.

On the other hand, there’s much to be said for those occasions where none of it is your agenda, and you get to try new things and meet new people. How did I end up going to a book launch for poet Robert Priest? Why from Facebook, of course.

This invite sold me in two seconds flat. I tend to get rather excited about flippant Catholic imagery, being a child of the Madonna generation. The cover of his book, Reading the Bible Backwards, featured the Madonna herself as the centre of a vinyl record. I mean, how cool was that?

Robert Priest, not to be confused with Judas Priest, is also known as Dr. Poetry. He writes poems for children, adults, and those who aren’t so sure. His numerous children’s books are beloved by CBC, Today’s Parent Magazine, and kiddies from sea to shining sea. But the good doctor is also playwright and novelist and journalist and songwriter. He also has big hair, always has, according to a quick scan on Google. He wrote a hit song for Alanis Morissette, and snippets for the Farmer’s Almanac. He writes for Now Magazine, Toronto’s progressive weekly, and consistently wins cool awards.  But best of all, in my mind, he says fascinating things about writing: “As a Priest, it is also my job to let the light in, to be a reflector, to open up curtains.”

Now, Priest is the kind of clever wordsmith I envy, the kind who never runs out of great titles like A Terrible Case of the Stars and Reading the Bible Backwards. Like the titles, there is an edge of razor wit and a tinge of droll morbidity throughout the poet’s wordscapes. Robert read a handful to a roomful of admirers, including a poem about that topic most neglected in poetry: the humble anus. Like I said, there were a few surreal things, and that was one of them, considering it was an excellent poem.

Now ECW Press editor Michael Holmes was certainly not shy in expressing how he felt about Robert’s new book. “Wonderful, powerful, funny,” he told us. “It’s my favourite book of Canadian poetry that I’ve read in years.”

I read the book cover-to-cover- back cover to front cover, that is- in honour of the title theme. (Another wonderful touch to the underlying Suessianism of an over-35 event: in devotion to the poet, one fellow wore his tie and sweater vest backwards.) We started with a cheerful love poem, and laughed our way through the mundane and hilarious emblems of this world. Sometimes I felt the spirit of e.e. cummings and even George Carlin, who was remembered in the book’s acknowledgements.

Along the way, I memed and spliced. Words danced. I encountered chicken physics, the trickster’s trickstress, and Frequently Unasked Questions. I looked up metazoan in the dictionary, and plowed right on through until I had read Reading the Bible Backwards back to front.

And all this is how it came to me, a small but curious discovery:

The Bible is not a palindrome, and if we all read Revelations first, we’d then know how insane it is to take it too literally. Which would mean that along the way, its poetry would not get lost in wars of literalism the way it has always gotten lost throughout its bloody history.

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

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.

Cypress Planting with Barbara Klar

Barbara Klar is intimate with trees. The poet spent nearly a decade planting them, and it’s clear from Cypress, her latest poetry collection from Brick Books, that she communes with the sacred through them. While there are millions of symbols of the natural world, from the salamander to the star, it is the tree on which we are dependent for oxygen, for materials for our shelters, even for the cross- and especially, for the book itself. The absence of the tree also reveals something: our greed as a species, our blatant lack of concern for the future, for the earth and its inhabitants.

Documenting the natural world, carefully recording or imitating its gifts, is an ancient tradition that yielded the earliest arts and the earliest religions. Even Judeo-Christian mythology harks back to Eden, a paradise garden strangely devoid of storms and plagues. Our absolute dependency on nature for food and shelter and safety has put as at her mercy, a theme paralleled in pagan and monotheistic theology, where we are always at its mercy. There is little that could inspire such devotion and awe as an ocean or a glacier or a tree. This time-honoured tradition of using art and poetry to observe the landscape and its meaning is also a very Canadian practice. From the Group of Seven to Emily Carr to Duncan Campbell Scott, Canadian artistry has been dependent since the beginning- making sense of our vast and majestic landscapes.

The author’s vision quest takes place in her home province of Saskatchewan, in Cypress Hills. She notes that there are no cypress trees there- the Métis called pine varieties ‘cypres’. The cypress tree, nonetheless, by its ghostly absence, is a potent symbol, for cemeteries throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East are abundant with this tree, a symbol of death and the afterlife. The ritualistic burial of the dead in cypress coffins and the planting of cypress trees near graves may have simply been a matter of perfumery- the fragrant tree helped improve the scent of the cemetery. But it has taken on the powerful role of watching over the dead and representing new life.

Barbara Klar carves eternal images from her trees, divining from her forests history, life and death’s endless cycle, the blood and the breath these grounds have witnessed. Sometimes, the poet’s wordiness- or worship- is too dense, like underbrush, forcing the hiker to turn back instead of going in. While her images are often captivating, the reader feels left out of the poet’s love affair with the forest- in a sense, uninvited. At times, it’s even worse- tagging along, but bored.

Still, it is a beautiful irony, a sacred ritual in and of itself, that we consume the tree in the very act or reading her history and her epitaph.

Cypress
Barbara Klar
Brick Books, 2008

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, from Handymaiden Editions. Her poetry has been widely published, in anthologies, and in journals including Quarry, Kairos, Rattle, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Geez, Spillway, White Wall Review, New Toronto Quarterly, and Modern Poetry. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Katia Grubisic’s What if Red Ran Out

How beautiful our children would have been, though poor at pool, Katia Grubisic laments. Just why this catches me so, I cannot say, but her book of What if Red Ran Out is filled with such what ifs and were nevers. Forget about hopes of grandiosity or words tangled up to make themselves unreadable to all but the chosen few academes who must translate them for us: Katia’s world is here on earth, here with strawberry jam and moths and “cardboard eclipse thingies.”

Katia’s work has appeared in all the mandatory Canadian literati publications like Grain and The Fiddlehead and Taddle Creek. But all of this is just a disguise. Sure, she can wrestle the big themes with the best of them, or slip images into your mind that will never leave it. She can use words like ‘concupiscence’ and ‘montivagant’ and ‘convivial,’ and drop names like Seamus and Camus like she means it.

But, Katia assures us, not to worry about all of that. “Don’t worry, this is a poem/entirely without grace,” she writes. Words are important to her, but the real concerns are more along the lines of “what if red ran out?” and about the laundry. Life, however tragic or rare, is also silly. In the world Katia sees, “Eros and Thanatos have gone to the mall.” If red does not run out, she will ‘exist on raspberries” like “others who have successfully lost their minds.”

All this suggests that what’s ahead for Katia’s writing will be witty, realistic vignettes, with sweeping metaphors and astute observations, rendered with cleverness and distinction. For now, there’s still that sense of a poet trying too hard, pushing words together to make a cellist appear under a tree, for example, without any real reason why she should be there. Poetry would do well to avoid more volumes in the archives with phrases like “missing the filigreed metacarpals’ infinite division.” You can feel the earth, though, if you toss away this heavy-handed surrealism. You can feel the pulse of a very funny, very unusual, very vivid woman, and you want to get rid of those unnecessary layers, to see her naked.

What if red ran out
Katia Grubisic
Goose Lane Editions, New Brunswick, 2008.

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

Buy Katia’s book or mine, or help out my blog by buying any books through this link:
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In Which the Author Discovers Erin Knight’s The Sweet Fuels

I could spend blissful years stirring academic poetic discourse around a classroom, exchanging highlighted notes and chewing on turns of phrase, but I must keep a promise I once made. I vowed to never frighten a person away from poetry, which has few enough readers, and to let more readers discover its joy. And how could I possibly do so besides sharing my own work with ‘the people?’ Well, I refuse to get caught up in the delicious word-twisting discussions of poetry that render it squashed and meaningless to anyone born after 1857, in the end.

You know what I’m talking about. Pick up an expensive art magazine, for example. You’ll hear it in the way the writers talk about a giant painting of bubbles. “The lines of the painting vivisect at terminal vertical intervals suggesting the death and excavation of history’s muse. To grasp the brushstroke with this painterly torture in mind, one must submerge all faculties in the absence of the artist’s intention.” Then they cheerfully tell you the painting, which to you seems to be a joyous and colourful celebration of gardens or something or other spring, is about the holocaust or Central American hostage holding and it costs four point seven million dollars.

And while I wholeheartedly believe we would all do well to do a few literary gymnastics, to read some old poetry and a few classics, to brush up on what’s currently on the prize lists or new in Canadian verse, it’s best that we recover honest expressions of our impressions. Remember when Kramer embarrasses the whole group by telling the girl with the Cyrano nose that she’s as pretty as any New Yorker? She ‘just needs a nose job,’ he tells her plainly. In the end, who gets the girl?

The tightly knit academic circles will forever bustle in their wordy, toothy circles. Like a bunch of heart surgeons discussing various valve suturing techniques, they will never lend a hand to the lay public to give their passion a wider audience. I vowed to be more like Kramer, to read a book as a smart and lively girl, tell it if it needs a nose job, and praise the beauty it already possesses.

Now, any number of literature professors or old-school editors would ask what the decidedly un-poetic New York television show Seinfeld has to do with Canadian poet Erin Knight’s debut, The Sweet Fuels.

Nothing, if poetry is only a Donne and Milton and Coleridge and never about the sweet plums in the icebox or Bob Dylan or about how even the rain has such small hands.

If you listen carefully to Kramer’s script, he’s a poet in every episode. Like William Carlos Williams, the K-Man waxes especially poetic about fruits. There’s the cantaloupe, there’s the avocado, and there’s the Mackinaw peaches, only available for two weeks of the year.

“The Mackinaw peaches, Jerry… I waited all year for this. Oooh, this is fantastic. Makes your taste buds come alive. It’s like having a circus in your mouth…Jerry, this is a miracle of nature that exists for a brief period. It’s like the Aurora Borealis.”

Don’t always run away from poetry because you don’t know ‘how to read poetry’ or ‘don’t get it.’ Just pick up the peach and savour it.

In Diamond, Knight writes: “Why write only if? Why not write if sunlight/strikes the dust motes in the room, if a splinter/wedges beneath your nail, if you fall/in love, if you fall? Write the nub of graphite/in your palm, pure carbon, memory/of a long-ago word- so many of us have it/lodged beneath the skin…”

Listen:

“Take the small maps on your knees. Grasses
traced routes there as you took back your wind,
while backstory spin in the bicycle tires.
When you stand, can you still read the legend
creased in the skin, is this your quietest scar?”

Listen:

“There’s a gnosis in the undersides of leaves,
silver edges turned up before a storm.”

I have no doubt that Knight’s work will stand up to the scrutiny of the higher hallways. Imagery, metaphor, “continuous engagement with our points of reference.” Check, check, check. But more importantly, this is the kind of book that talks about making tea, about making bread, about leaving the prairies, about searching maps for clues of our past. It is the kind of book that can earn the trust of the pedestrian audience, let us giggle, let us cry, move our ordinary experiences into the divinity of that diamond dust mote.

It can keep a person going through the endless and trivial travails. It is delicious, tender, redolent, and fleeting- like those fabled Mackinaw peaches, sweet fuel.

The Sweet Fuels, by Erin Knight.Goose Lane Editions, 2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, a Handymaiden Edition, 2006. Look for it on Indigo or Amazon. Her poetry has also been published widely in journals like Spillway, Rattle, Modern Poetry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Quarry, White Wall Review, and more.

Please help me by purchasing the books I talk about, my book, or any other books at chapters.indigo.ca

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.

For Elaine, a Mermaid

For Elaine, a Mermaid

There are claws across her face like bands

and miles and miles in her eyes

the stars bite into her frozen hands

she’s shining in the moonlit skies.

I called her name, it sounded silver

on my slivered tongue, a gorgeous sound

she shivered in that fiery river

so terrified of being found.

In dreams, she is an orphan

in day dreams, she is by the sea

I begged for her like she were morphine

and dreamed that she came home to me.

This poem was written for Elaine Bown who was murdered in the late 80s. She was 17. This is a selection from my book The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, Handymaiden Editions, 2006. Available through indigo.ca or through thegirlcanwrite.net.

Sheri Benning’s Thin Moon Psalm

“The trick of May is to believe with empty hands,” Sheri Benning writes in Thin Moon Psalm. It is these perfectly pure phrases that make her prairie psalm a special gift. This poetry volume is that rare moment of silence in a bustling world, taking us back to the enchantment of the open sky, the moon, the things of magic and wonder that could once soothe even the most broken of hearts or skinned of elbows. “…always, after we fail at faith, small-fires of crocus or bluebell snag the eye.”

Thin Moon Psalm is Benning’s second book, following up Earth After Rain. The manuscript won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. Her first book won two awards, also, and she won the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Award for achievement in the arts.

That may all validate the $18 you should spend on this book, but the real reason? these small snags of bluebell:

“You make tea for a man who was your lover./Where once there was desire, now a  palm-sized heartbeat,/ pleasant to hold.”

“Night moved across you like a glacier and you woke here, bone-broken, far from where you thought you would be. If you could tie a string to your what-ifs, this is what you would weave- a hydra-nest of jackpine.”

“Listening has made your heart a bruise, a dark pearl of gravity.”

In each selection, the thin moon illuminates outlines, suggests the meanings, leaves secrets dancing in shadows. These thoughts, unsent letters, dreams, private despairs, give depth to shared experiences that we may gloss over as ordinary. Love and loss will always be the dominating themes of literature, from mythology to the Bible to Canadian poets. They are the deepest, darkest and most beautiful themes in the human experience.

Thin Moon Psalm
Sheri Benning,
Brick Books, London
2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Her poetry book is available through her site, or through indigo.ca.

Nadine McInnis’s Two Hemispheres

There’s nothing more fascinating than madness. Once, I wondered how a mind could come unhinged: now, with a bit of firsthand experience and a few decades’ observations, I know everybody’s crazy.

Nadine McInnis shares this fascination, and reveals her own melancholic illness in Two Hemispheres, an exquisite collection of poems from Brick Books.

That artists write poetry about their depression is nothing new: the hurt heart is all of literature. But the elegant and insightful way the poet weaves her own experience of despair into deeply intuitive conjecture of others’ madness is nothing short of brilliant.

Irrevocably moved by mid-1800s portraits of madwomen of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, but left with meagre or nonexistent accounts of their cases, McInnis delves into the recesses of her own imagination to respond to the photographs. Reprinted here, the sepia images and accompanying imagination of their conditions resurrect from erasure these asylum ghosts.

The poet eloquently fuses her journey with the forgotten ones, showing the mind’s depth and vigor as equal to its fragility. The dusty halls of history come alive: be transported from the threshold of your own insanity into another era, one where lunatics wander asylum gardens. Recognize your own circle within these madhouse walls- one woman fancies herself royalty, with blood “cool/ and untroubled and blue, blue as heaven.” Another is terrified of damnation; one refuses to eat; another thinks they’re trying to poison her. These patients, “rescued from indigence,” mirror something of my day-to-day life, despite the Victorian dresses.

There’s nothing clear in our still-relevant muddle to understand the human mind and its connection to reality, whatever that is. Ages of pharmacology, of religious charity, of the sex-obsessed dream analysis of cocaine-addled Dr. Freud; the shamanistic mythologies of primeval and remote peoples, the terrifying devices and restraints, the hazy restful dreams of convalescence or abusive therapists, the deciphering of the voices of angels, the casting out of demons; the equally persuasive evidences that addiction is organic and spiritual in nature- and still we have nothing but a few helpless maps of dendrites and synapses, as if this could help us connect the dots between the two hemispheres of the brain.

Miasma, mania, catalepsy, electrodes- McInnis peers for us through the disconcerting lens of mental illness’s language, and languishes there, finding a place for herself and her Victorian lunatic friends that does not cover nor cower. We glimpse revelations of her own struggle through darkness, and into dawn.

Way back when the Titanic stormed back into popularity, the supremely saccharine qualities of the film were redeemed when Rose muttered dramatically this truth: “a woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.”
Perhaps mysteries are not always meant to be solved- but instead to be revealed in small increments worthy of contemplation. These crazy ladies seem to revel in their brief moment of sepia stardom: their eyes, at turns hopeless, at turns defiant, at turns feisty or ribald, challenge the absence of factual case histories or dry statistics. Something of their deep ocean is revealed here. McInnis’s uncanny ability to disappear and let these other voices through is, ironically, what makes her own stories more compelling. Whether the secrets imagined are true or not is irrelevant- Salmond Rushdie recently said that what sets humans apart from other animals is our curious habit of telling stories to make meaning out of our lives.

Crazy people make stuff up, but isn’t mythology all about the universality of mystery? “True or false” may have no more merit than those ubiquitous but inanimate statistics we sadly live by. Thankfully, McInnis masterfully shows us that the meaning of life just might be the flickering dark/light interior of our imagination. That very same place inside may be the source of our disconnection and our illness, but it is also the source of our healing and recovery.

Two Hemispheres
Nadine McInnis
Brick Books, 2007

If you would like Lorette C. Luzajic to write for your publication, or would simply like more great stuff to read, visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.