Featured Review: Year of the Metal Rabbit by Tammy Armstrong (Review by D.S. Stymeist)

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Year of the Metal Rabbit by Tammy Armstrong
(Kentville, NS: Gaspareau Printers & Publishers, 2019, 107 pages, $21.95 CAD)

Tammy Armstrong’s fifth book of poetry, Year of the Metal Rabbit, comprises a series of deeply imagistic illuminations of the human encounter with the natural world and the animals that flit and ghost through it. As the author and her husband, American poet George Moore, reside in rural Nova Scotia, it is not surprising that the specific geographies of the Maritimes figure largely in these poems. Nonetheless, Armstrong’s bioregional focus is not solely limited to the Atlantic Canada; there are poems that travel through the unique ecological terrains of the Prairies, the American Southwest, the Louisiana wetlands.

Countering the current Can-Lit preoccupation with urban pop-culture, Armstrong shamelessly indulges a passion for richly layered natural description: “the bat orchid’s whiskery mouth/its vaulted keel petals, fat as a bottom lip.”  While nature poetry has been dismissed as romantic sentimentality, in this moment of heightened ecological crisis our relationships with nature have acquired new importance and valence, as we’ve seen in the prescient work of Elise Partridge, Basma Kavanagh, and Don McKay. Without being overtly political, Armstrong’s ecopoetics probe the dimensions of this foundational and kinetic relationship with nature that “we hardly know.” In “Mole,” “myopic star men” press up against and undermine our urban constellations: “these squatters break ground/below our artless streets, our empty suburbs.”

In an interview with the honest ulsterman, Armstrong reveals her enthusiasm for “thinking animal-human couplings.” Not surprisingly, her verse erodes and makes porous the divide between animal and human. In “Dry Spell, Still,” people take on the attributes of wild fauna:

From the stoop, I watch the neighbour—
gone tooth and scruff sometime over the past year
             a touch of the bird about him now
flocked on some upper bough of thought—

One would expect, from the long and storied tradition of lyric nature poetry, that the first-person speaker of Armstrong’s poems is driven into the confrontation with the wild in order to further define and delineate herself. Yet, Armstrong, as the collection’s blurb offers, “give[s] slip to the snares set by lyric and narrative convention” by refusing to adhere to the notion of a singular or knowable self, much less a self that could be unlocked through an encounter with nature. For instance, the poet-speaker in “Sea Break” others her former self as “that girl” of “another time.” Dividing self into the “twoness of she and I,” the speaker then takes this former self “out to where the sand gave way to the under-tow” and drowns her. In a similar vein, the poem “At Daniel’s Head” uses the encounter with “sharp-faced/sickle-winged/terns” to expose the speaker as “an unfinished otherwise, a shade and corner thing” who never sought identification with the flitting terns but sought instead “the unsettled scatter/the stacked thought…”

At a hundred and seven pages of densely descriptive poetry, this collection is no slight, starveling calf, but a finely muscled beast fully deserving of readers’ full attentiveness. Frankly, her work impresses, delights, and astonishes both with its sustained maximalism and its vatic revelation of how “we happen in the gaps/in the stranger places.” 

D.S. Stymeist’s The Bone Weir (Frontenac 2016) was shortlisted for the Canadian Author’s Association award for Poetry. He has published widely in both academic and literary magazines. Alongside fending off Crohn’s disease, he teaches at Carleton University. For a number of years, he was president of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.

Featured Review: MY SHADOW IN DACHAU: Poems by Victims and Survivors of the Concentration Camp. Review by James W. Wood.

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MY SHADOW IN DACHAU: Poems by Victims and Survivors of the Concentration Camp (New York and London: Camden House Publishing, 2015, $85.00, 314 pages). Edited by Dorothea Heiser and Stuart Taberner. Review by James W. Wood.

Writing in his commonplace book, A Certain World, WH Auden noted that, “every poem ever written is important, since it affirms the existence of an individual mind.” Auden’s words might serve as a maxim for the reader of this collection of more than seventy poems by sixty-five writers, translated into English for the first time since its original German publication in 1993.

It would be uncharitable, if not untrue, to state that this book’s significance as a cultural and historical document possibly eclipses the quality of some of the verse included. Yet as the book’s English-language editor, Professor Stuart Taberner, notes in his considered and passionate introduction, “each of these poems embodies an individual’s attempt to confront an awful reality” – the barbarity of the Nazis as seen by those imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp. For all that some of the poets may not have been “trained”, or, “literary” in any sense, the raw emotion captured in their verse rings clear across more than seventy years, asking today’s reader to compare their plight with, among others, today’s Professor of Creative Writing who simply can’t finish their next book of poems without a grant.

Divided into four sections which capture life in the concentration camps, meditations on the purpose or meaning of suffering, the liberation experience in 1945 and poetry by those who survived into the eighties, nineties and beyond, much of this poetry is the precise opposite of the selfconscious, mannered and politically correct verse one might expect from some of today’s “professional poets”. In tone and content, most of these
poets are writing in a register somewhere between Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”, and the Gerard Manley Hopkins of the “terrible sonnets” – raw horror, disgust, shame and confusion reign in this work from first to last. And yet, throughout, there is beauty in the horror.

Here is writing as a form of prayer, with post-war German intellectual Walter Jens recording that inmates would scribble “secret messages on scraps of paper”; writing as an act of memory, as poet Karl Roeder recalled how, “the ideas, thoughts and feelings [I had] screamed to be written down”; and, most of all, writing as testimony and warning, as the French inmate Arthur Hulot determined in a letter written on his liberation from the camps, “one must fight with pity and compassion for those who will follow.”

Indeed, the vast range of what’s on offer here, both in terms of languages (poets writing in Russian, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Serbian, Slovenian, Czech and Polish are included), form (everything from free verse to, strangely, metrically perfect romantic sonnets) and subject matter is another compelling factor. The poets themselves range from literary professionals working as journalists, writers and teachers prior to their incarceration to scientists, architects and engineers – in other words, human souls who turned to self-expression both as succour in the face of horror, and for the ancient purpose of creating a memorial to experience.

If criticism of some of the less achieved originals is inappropriate given the circumstances of the poems’ making (one poet/inmate recalled “swapping my bread for scraps of paper”; another worked on “a single, dirty folded piece of paper” which he kept for years until his release from Dachau), then readers may feel more justified in finding fault with some of the translations, which range from the uniformly excellent work of George Szirtes, the British/Hungarian poet and translator, through to other more workmanlike attempts at rendering various European tongues in to English. Szirtes wonderful English quatrain below captures the despair and revulsion of the concentration camp inmate:

………………………..“Yesterday is past and gone
………………………..Tomorrow is a whore
………………………..Bright skies you dreamed beneath
………………………..Are not dreams any more.” (Laszlo Salamon, “Forgetting”)

Unfortunately, some other translators have chosen to render the wide range of rhymes available in certain Slavonic languages into an English which occasionally falls short of the mark. Recent translations of Brodsky (by the English poet Glyn Maxwell) and Milosz (by Robert Haas and Robert Pinsky) suggest that one can render Slavonic languages into English verse and retain their music and mood. Elsewhere, a poet writing in German makes use of a refrain which is translated two or three different ways depending on the context in English, a practice which surely detracts from the phrase’s power as a refrain.

These minor quibbles apart, both the publisher and editors should be congratulated on making this wide range of voices available in English at last. Biographies of each poet are complemented by notes on Dachau itself, a glossary of terms, and suggestions for further reading on the period. Above all else, this volume appears at a time when our world looks once more to be sliding towards a level of barbarous inhumanity last seen in these concentration camps seventy years ago, and thus its significance both as testament and warning to us cannot be underestimated. If the poet/inmate Stanislaw Wygodzki wrote that, “one day, you will enter sleepy bookshops/for a book to read about us…/forget it, you won’t understand anyway”, then he surely could not have imagined that our world would now have the horrors of Raqqa and Mosul to compare with those perpetrated by the Nazis.

Ultimately, through the despair, suffering and horror, the final message of this book is optimistic: whether they perished in the camps (as many of these writers did) or lived on for over sixty years, all seem to believe, somewhere, in the continued existence of humanity and in the importance of poetry as a form of witness – and this in direct opposition to Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted saw that, “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” The poet/inmate Nevio Vitelli, who died in 1948 at the age of twenty as a result of an illness contracted in Dachau, provides the poem from which this volume takes its name. The survival and subsequent publication of this poem was only possible because his friend and fellow poet Mirco Giuseppe Camia retained the handwritten manuscript of the poem for more than forty years, believing that, “this poem holds everything: the agony of imprisonment and the elegy of freedom; the memories of earthly love and motherly love…forgiveness…I have saved this poem for over forty years [because] it became for me the essence of life: too many people have created Golgotha for others.”

James W. Wood has written four books of poetry including The Anvil’s Prayer (2013), and a thriller. He is published in the UK, US and Canada, including The TLS, Poetry Review, London Magazine, Fiddlehead, South-West Review, Boston Review and others. Educated at Cambridge, he won a scholarship to Boston University and lives in Toronto.

This review was published in the digital issue 12:1 “Surrender.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: REVELATOR by Ron Silliman. Review by David Swartz.

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Revelator by Ron Silliman (Toronto, ON: BookThug, 2013. $17.00, 80 pages). Review by David Swartz.

To read Ron Silliman’s Revelator (2013) is to unleash a 200-mile-an-hour wind through the eye of a needle. Above all, Silliman teaches us how not to stay still, why we ought to rethink our normative views of termination, of the sentence-ing act itself, and of its relationship to reality. Revelator is a living breathing poetry machine, fuelled by the poet’s memory, and a passionate commitment to formal inventiveness; at once natural, whimsical, brilliant, and humane.

Throughout Revelator, Silliman uses five-word lines, a form borrowed from the final section of Louis Zukofsky’s poem, “A.” Clearly, Silliman views Zukofsky as his immediate predecessor and perhaps mentor. His own book reveals a vision of infinite enjambment, and takes a leap of faith in the direction of what the author calls “the new sentence” technique. According to Silliman, “the new sentence is the first prose technique to identify the signifier (even that of the blank space) as the locus of literary meaning.” The main effect of “the new sentence” is that “each sentence plays with the preceding and following sentence.” In Silliman’s hands, this idea is taken to its logical conclusion, allowing the active subject of the poem to remain perpetually in the present moment.

Seemingly composed of one sentence only, Revelator’s multiple caesuras turn words themselves into sentences, which are then juxtaposed with other word sentences, causing surprise. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the words are not intentionally linked up by logic or argument. According to Silliman, the magic is in the “blank space[s], between words or sentences.” Silliman uses caesuras and enjambments to create such spaces, and to help his spiralling song lift itself off the ground. Something different at every turn. It could be the middle of the night or the break of day. Watch out for the narrow tunnels!

As Silliman loosens his hand, words tumble forth in playful combinations. Silliman plays with words in the same way a painter might play with paint and colour. He allows us to see how language does things on its own. The poet’s role is to allow this to happen. To play curator to one’s own voices. Language does not allow for random permutations, the more reckless the abandon, the more meaningful and thoroughly poetic the outcome.

Silliman’s ceaseless stream of words seems silly. He sets us straight at the outset concerning his true intentions: “Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene.” The author’s admission of being “unseemly” is particularly illuminating. Silliman’s “unseemliness” is a way of “seeing,” a way of making a “scene.” It many cases Silliman sounds silly as a result of his mixed-up propositional logic, in conjunction with his run-on sentence from here to nowhere. Ultimately, the poet’s vision merges with an invisible, ostensibly “randomized” presentation that gives way to a close interweaving of logical and illogical elements. Words “torn” from other places become one united thing bound together by “the binding” stitched into the body of the book:

………………………………..each page would blow wild
………………………………..but for the binding stitched
………………………………..deep into the notebook’s spine

The organic nature of the notebook is a reminder that its living essence is the living man.

On another occasion Silliman writes:

………………………………..Eternity in the present only
………………………………..I shut my eyes, inhale,
………………………………..deeply to hear five speakers’
………………………………..simultaneous yatter, squirrels up high

Here the poet alludes to the metaphysical foundation of his poetic vision—to his one and his many—to the multiplicity of voices in his hands, and ultimately, to the five words spoken at the same time as a line of poetry, as a projection of thought before thinking.

………………………………..there’s an art
………………………………..to it intuited before thought
………………………………..thinks—

The slender body of Silliman’s poem adds to the ease with which it can be read and digested. Its lack of traditional subject matter and narrative, along with its exuberant and wide-ranging trajectory of ideas and ramblings, liberates the reader from being forced to follow a simpleminded train of thought. What Silliman has discovered is that the meaning of the train ride is not about ever reaching the final destination, but the experience of movement itself.

Revelator is about the power of awakening the visionary self-conception of “I-amb that Iamb,” echoing God’s declaration of His unnameable name. Only in this case, it is the poem itself declaring its sovereignty and unity over its multiplicity of disjointed voices. The word Revelator is a reference to Saint John the Revelator, the presumed writer of Revelations. The cover photograph depicts Silliman in 1978 reading his poetry aloud on Market Street by the Bank of America in San Francisco. This is the place where street preachers would address the teeming city crowds with prophecies of doom and gloom, salvation and redemption: “Change your ways, O ye people of the marketplace, the Kingdom of God is near!” Like John the Revelator, Silliman points the way to salvation through “the new sentence,” towards an end of our bondage to traditional language narratives, teleologies, and sentence usages.

Silliman’s iambic syllables dream his poem into being. His five word lines, engendered and inspired by the tangential illogic of “the new sentence” reveal a powerful source of raw energy. The magic of the book is that it seems to never end or begin. Afterwards, words merge, our notions of direction, time, and space are suspended. Most of all, ours ideas about the nature of the sentence are transformed.

Echoing Michelangelo, Silliman argues that the poem he is writing already contains itself, and needs only to be voiced:

……………………………………………………………..Stone
………………………………..said to contain its own
………………………………..sculpture thwarts choice—to voice
………………………………..vowels languidly moist lips purse
………………………………..their part—there’s an art
………………………………..to it intuited before thought thinks

In an interview with Silliman, arranged by BookThug, Silliman says: “The poems are telling me where to go rather than the other way around.” Indeed, while Silliman’s poem, like the human experience, “seeks fate through narrative causation,” we find such markers both everywhere and nowhere.

………………………………..What narrative cut asunder, short
………………………………..of a proper end, but
………………………………..ends themselves aren’t proper, fixed
………………………………..image (the camera always lies!)

Having grown into its own, Revelator refuses to go the way of all flesh. A living thing not only defies logic, but all forms of terminative fixation. There is, at least according to Silliman’s poetic philosophy, no end to the living sentence. The way things grow involves constant change. Revelator itself, the author maintains, is only 1 out of 360 sections of a larger unfinished work called “Universe.”

Silliman’s juxtapositions of puns surprise us, without confusing us; we know we are out of time, and that the author is gluing together seemingly random fragments of meaning, combined together to achieve one larger projective meaning.

Poetry is as much about form as it is about subject, e.g., philosophy, love, inspiration, or any number of things. Form not only crystallizes ideas, but also gives birth to thought. In order to reform our thoughts we must liberate them from their self-contented propositional logic, and look for “teleological justification” in what is right in front of us (“Eternity in the present only”).

Revelator is a sculpture, a river, a tonic, an inspiration; an invitation to a fantastical inner world where spectacles of seemingly silly speech reveal the boundless possibilities of poetic language. Ron the Revelator reveals the word made flesh as a living breathing poetry machine. Expect an unexpected turn anywhere. If life is a sentence (however short or long), “scream for // that which is unnameable” and “balk // at any configuration,” but above all else, don’t stop writing!

David Swartz is a Canadian writer, editor and visual artist. He has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and is currently studying painting at the Faculdade de Belas Artes at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Check out his website: http://www.davidswartzart.com/.

This review was published in issue 11:2 “Speed.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: THE POETIC EDDA. Translated by Jeramy Dodds. Review by Eleni Zisimatos.

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The Poetic Edda (Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2014, $23.95, 280 pages). Translated by Jeramy Dodds. Review by Eleni Zisimatos.

This translation of Old Norse and Icelandic poems by Jeramy Dodds is an exceptional work of Canadian poetic achievement. The book is divided into three sections: “Mythological Poems,” “Heroic Poems,” and “Poems Not in The Codex Regius,” all of which have their own impetus and flavour. The first section is lighter, more playful; replete with sayings and advice from the old, wise ones. “Heroic Poems” is more involved and deals more with heroes and heroines, deeds, mishaps, and destinies. The last section follows along the lines of “Heroic Poems,” where we encounter strong imagery like: “‘Dan and Damp have costly halls, / more lavish lands than you; / they know how to sail, how to make / a sword bite, run the red from a wound.’”

This book brings to light the background for the Tolkien myths, brings to the forefront Viking legends—the Norse mythology we often don’t realize we are engaged with when we read about Valkyries, the undead, and magic lore. The original Icelandic poems were written by Christian scribes in Iceland around the thirteenth century, which undoubtedly were influenced by the struggle between Pagan and Christian beliefs. Kings and Queens abound throughout the volume, as do witches and magic, and the all-important ash tree, Yggdrasil. The text jumps to attention with passages like:

………………………….‘His teeth flash when he sees
………………………….his sword, or when he eyes Bodvild’s
………………………….ring. His stare is as sharp as a shiny
………………………….serpent’s. I say slice his sinews
………………………….and set him near Saevarstadir.’

There are numerous translations such as this one throughout the three sections—all lending freedom to the imagination and bringing us back in time to our own imagined mythology of these wild people.

If I was pressed to find a weakness in the book, I would say that there is sometimes (not often) a break between high and low language. For instance, a passage such as: “Whoever can rear heirs as astonishing / As those Gjuki sired would be happy. / Their courage will live on in every land / wherever people hear it,” is largely formal and contrasts with the more colloquial “‘Shut up, Freyja, I know you / all too well, you’re not flawless—you’ve been the bitch of every / Elf and Aesir on the benches here.’” But to be fair, there are differences in the style of the two texts (located in two different sections), and I could only judge properly if I read the poems in the original Icelandic.

I was also somewhat bothered by the opening epigraph that was not translated (I am a great fan of epigraphs). To make up for this minor oversight, Jeramy Dodds included an exhaustive and impressive “Annotated Index of Names” at the end of the book, an undertaking which I know from experience can drive a writer to distraction.

The Poetic Edda is a brilliant book—playful and imaginative. The language flows crisply and effortlessly in the hands of Dodds, and is accessible to both young and old readers. This translation is akin to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, and is a notable addition to Canadian writing and translation.

Eleni Zisimatos is co-Editor-in-Chief of Vallum Magazine. She lives in Montreal.

This review was published in issue 12:1 “Surrender.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: SOME DANCE by Ricardo Sternberg. Review by Zachariah Wells.

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Some Dance by Ricardo Sternberg (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. $16.95, 82 pages). Review by Zachariah Wells.

Ricardo Sternberg opens his fourth poetry collection with a poem titled, “An Invocation of Sorts,” a nod to the Homeric epic. As the title suggests, Sternberg’s appeal to the muse isn’t wholly in earnest. Before the poem’s end, he says: “as for theme, leave it to me / to come up with something / that while not highfalutin, // carries a whiff of the sublime.”

Writing recently in The National Post, Michael Lista asserted that “Ricardo Sternberg is one of the absolute best poets in this country,” a statement that Sternberg’s fastidious and yet winkingly modest poems would insist that we qualify. I would argue that Sternberg is a master of a certain sort of poem: a delightful poem of conversational semi-formal aplomb that is charmingly witty, gently self-deprecating, and disarmingly poignant.

In “Mule,” a poem from Bamboo Church, Sternberg’s previous collection, he lets us know that he is not aiming at grandeur: “You were forewarned / and have no right // to ask this mule / to be what it is not. / This is no poem for you.” Sternberg has a sneaky way of smuggling covert cargo into his verse. A word that often recurs in Sternberg poems is “meandering;” and meander is what these poems do, beautifully. It is telling that the two best pieces in Some Dance, “No Love Lost” and “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis,” are about writer’s block and procrastination. Sternberg has not been prolific—his books have appeared in 1990, 1996, 2003 and 2014. But the poems themselves are reminders that productivity, that totem god of late capitalism, is overrated, and that idleness can be the arena of art.

If Some Dance has a muse, it is not Calliope, the muse of epic, but Mnemosyne, the personification of memory and mother of all muses. Rosemary Sullivan has called Sternberg “a poet of memory,” and this has never been truer than in his latest book. Personal recall is a stock prop of lyric verse. But Sternberg does more to complicate recall than most poets.

The first fourteen poems comprise a faux-epic sequence whose protagonist, in moments of reflection, “scrambl[es] events from his life / with fiction and the TV soaps.” Throughout the collection, we encounter various failures and inventions of memory, and in “Manual,” the penultimate poem and another ars poetica, “the word engine starts / again at the very start: / to stutter its way towards truth / or lies and be, at the end, / unable to tell them apart.”

If this kind of stuttering is not the stuff of Great Poetry, it is, in the hands of an astute craftsman like Sternberg, the matter of very good minor poetry, which is rarer than it ought to be. If you let Some Dance spin you across its polished parquetry, you won’t be sorry.

Zachariah Wells (www.zachariahwells.com) is a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. His most recent book is Career Limiting Moves: Interviews, Rejoinders, Essays, Reviews.

This review was published in issue 11:2 “Speed.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: YAW by Dani Couture. Review by Jenna Bulter.

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Yaw by Dani Couture. (Toronto, ON: Mansfield Press, 2014. $17.00, 64 pages) Review by Jenna Butler.

Yaw is a fascinating collection—part general examination into the grieving process, part specific homage to one disappeared person—that demands multiple readings. It’s a deceptively slim book: you can read it in one sitting. It’s in rereading, however, that one catches the careful nuances of these fast-paced poems.

“Hail Mary” gets the collection off to a terrific start, the strong first-person lines setting a decisive tone for the exploration of personal grief that is to follow: “I am both the unanswered phone and the caller untethered. / I am the turned back to the Hail Mary pass / in the last seconds of the final quarter.” The gorgeousness of this book lies in its curt lines, the way they swing on exact details that nail the poems perfectly into place: “A body propelled / through molared window. / We all have places to go.”

Couture at her best is a master of capturing the larger event—death, a storm, an argument, a troubled relationship—and pinning it into place with a handful of brilliantly selected words. Each of her poems is an exercise in simultaneous speaking and listening, turned inward to the event, while also speaking to the outer world. This is evident in the poem “F-scale, Ohio.” Here the storm is both real, and a metaphor for grief: “How / in 74, the sky turned its face toward us, bowed / down, and blew the town out like a wish.” Couture’s words offer the gut-punch of grief precisely observed, and the reader buckles: “The heart / is a small, chambered abattoir until it’s not.”

What is arguably the strongest poem in the book comes early and sets the bar high. “Fact Check,” a list poem, internalizes the police procedure following a death and plays it out again through the way in which one turns facts over and over again in memory. “did he tell you he loved you?” it begins. “did he refuse to give you back your key?” What starts as a review of an apparently complicated relationship slides sideways into an unexpected death and the many ways of managing absence: “did you drink morning rye from a cold coffee mug?” … “did you hold water in your mouth but not swallow?” The curt questions are destabilizing, mimicking the way we self-interrogate following an accident or a death, questioning whether something truly happened the way we remember it. This is the courtroom cross-examination writ small, the minutiae leading up to a death that afterwards form the only map for finding our way back out. “did you lose your taste for sleep?” Couture wants to know. “do the dead walk in your dreams? / do they call you? / do the dead still call you? / Thank you for your time.”

The few failings in this collection are easily forgiven in light of the overall excellence of the book. These minor poetic slip-ups include Couture’s tendency to rhyme too closely, or to play too often with approximate repeated sounds (“The curve of the cumulus, slant of swampish sidelight, the strain / of weeds alongside the route, familiar but not familial”). Sometimes Couture slips into repetition that dulls the lines: “we slept heavy, / draped across one another—a litter, / leg-tangled, sleeping” and “Hump shouldering south before / coming back round, the cancelled / spring hunt pushes one kind / of hunger farther south.” This is puzzling, since Couture is normally adept at saying only what needs to be said. Still, these issues are minor when compared to the usual decisiveness and precision of her language.

Yaw is a gorgeous read, slim but challenging, demanding a close eye and
frequent rereading. Couture looks into the heart of grief and captures
clearly whatever stares back, “The moments we catch ourselves reflected
in paned glass, / avoid the eyes of what’s missing. What never made
it back.”

Jenna Butler is the author of four books: On the Grizzly Trail, Seldom Seen Road, Wells, and Aphelion. She teaches creative writing at Red Deer College and lives with three resident moose and a den of coyotes on a small organic farm in Alberta’s north country.

This review was published in issue 11:2 “Speed.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: METROPANTHEON by Steven Artelle. Review by Francesca Bianco

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poetry, poetry review, review, steven artelle

Metropantheon by Steven Artelle (Winnipeg, MB: Signature Editions, 2014, $14.95, 88 pages). Review by Francesca Bianco.

In thinking about Steven Artelle’s Metropantheon, a debut collection of poetry that seeks to unsettle the sometimes droid-like existence of urban life, another piece of creative work leaps to mind. The 1998 documentary, “The Cruise,” delves into the problematic nature of the New York City’s grid plan, with social commentator Speed Levitch at the helm. In his estimation, the blueprint of Manhattan emanates from our weaknesses: the puritan system of ninety-degree angles is homogenizing in a city where there is no homogenization available. As Levitch walks down a back street, he declares that, “[In New York] there is only total cacophony, a total flowing of human ethnicities and tribes and beings and gradations of awareness and consciousness.” With the same measured and polemic wit as Levitch, Steven Artelle’s Metropantheon tags over and deconstructs the urban space and elevates the city, in this case Toronto, to mythic proportions. The exposed streets and hidden alleyways are rewritten to erase the monotony of daily living to shift towards a reflection of our most embellished, hallucinatory fantasies. For a slim volume of poetry, Metropantheon contains so many implications and allusions we could come to regard it nestled comfortably in between the foreboding vibrations of Yeats’ “Second Coming” and the caffeinated exaltations of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” However, Metropantheon celebrates rather than gives caution to what the future holds.

In an online interview with rob mclennan about his poetry, Steven Artelle reveals that his writing “always circles back to the nature of cities, encounters with divinity in a secular environment, wrestling with individual identity in a collective culture.” Metropantheon, for, instance, is a space where Artelle has “tried to overwrite the secular experience of cities in western culture by inventing an urban mythology, rituals, supernatural interventions.” In Metropantheon, the poet channels the grit and grime of a dystopic city through graffitichild; a being who grapples with his / her relationship to the collective culture of the city space. graffitichild is a mythic personality on the urban periphery, a kind of trickster god who is at once a creator and a destroyer, a giver and a negator, who misleads and is misled. To make this work, Artelle corrals language suited to the chaos and density of the urban: portmanteau words (“gladhands”, “nightchurch”, “heartjawed”) gospel-like repetition (O blessed infidelity / O candles collapsed into swans), and erratic, staccatoed rhythms. The “lines and cracks of every sidewalk” become Artelle’s source for creativity. Something like love, like art, is happening “somewhere behind the drywall” and it “smells like a manifesto.” In Metropantheon the new and revolutionary mythology slouches out from behind the concrete curtains.

In the ancient world, a pantheon is a space dedicated to the gods. Roman consul and noted historian, Cassius Dio, remarked that Rome’s Pantheon, because of its vaulted roof, “resembles the heavens.” If Artelle’s collection is like the Pantheon’s portico, then graffitichild is the oculus: the structure’s central opening and a feat and wonder of human effort and ingenuity. However, in Metropantheon the bones of the city are not as dependable as one might think. The city, as rendered in the poem “heat”, is “constructed with slabs of fat / the whole thing slathered together / and wobbling under the eyeless mortar of the sun.” Beings either emerge above the city’s surface or are submerged. In this case, graffitichild states simply: “I am an outline” and at the margins of the speaker’s own sense of identity and relationship to the “splintered skyline.”

Interestingly, one of the strongest poems in the collection carries with it the most substantial emotional infrastructure. It is a break from the turbo-charged, dense imagery injected with Artelle’s mythic imagination. The poem, “the evidence of windows” begins concretely by placing us at “hinton north and wellington” in Toronto amongst “bikes and uncertain traffic” and then shifts to become an existential lament on love:

……….and it was your name over and over that afternoon and so it was
……………maybe you as I eavesdropped and maybe missed my calling
……….until the part about how we make the wrong decisions and
……………live with it or not in the acoustic dark and the part about love

It is an accessible piece redolent of the fluctuating doubt and melancholy we feel in relationships and in loss. It is a poem “about you and me unable to lean out.”

Artelle’s overarching project is less about narrative, less about understanding what exactly happens to, say, graffitichild than it is about refashioning language itself. The burning core of Metropantheon lies in the attempt to deconstruct and rebuild a pantheon of reinvigorated, resonant mode of expression fit for the gods. It should be noted that stamina is required in reading Metropantheon in the same way it is harnessed when slogging between subway, tram, and office building. In “half-skinned rabbit”, however, the speaker reminds us that we “stretch [our] hand into whatever new glove this is.” The reader follows a similar path to familiarity as they move through the collection. Metropantheon becomes our city, our experience, our new glove that molds, breathes, and expands to our daily elation and struggle.

Francesca Bianco is a writer and farm gal living in snowy northern British Columbia. She intends to complete a Masters in Journalism at UBC next fall.

This review was published in issue 12:1. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: WHAT DOES A HOUSE WANT?: Selected Poems by Gary Geddes. Review by David Swartz

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David Swartz, gary geddes, poetry, poetry review, review

WHAT DOES A HOUSE WANT?: Selected Poems by Gary Geddes (Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2014, $19.95, 239 pages). Review by David Swartz.

In What Does A House Want? Gary Geddes brings a full chorus of voices to the table, speaks loudly about relevant contemporary issues, is imaginative, rich, varied, and deeply political. Unlike what one might have expected out of a new book of poetry in 2014, Geddes’ collection is about collectedness itself (“A house wants to stay / where it is… is a safe / haven, anchorage, place of rest.”), exemplified by a clear, precise, lucid, yet buoyant lyricism (“I never lost my cool, but took them one by one, like a cat collecting kittens”). Walking amongst the still tender ruins of twentieth century political history, Geddes concerns himself with what a house requires to maintain life, speculating “laughter, sounds of lovemaking,” memories of past occupants, solidity, consistency. “Is there no aesthetic to consistency anymore, / that’s what I want to know.” What a house needs most of all are guests, and Geddes embraces and appropriates his guests the way an author welcomes a character into a novel he is writing.

The intention of the poet to build a house where a collective of words can be appreciably unified is propelled by the poet’s incurable need to form such a whole, “charting connections / few had ever dreamed of.” A task such as this requires more than mere politicizing and raw constructive power: one needs a house plan.

The unforgettable front cover of Geddes’ book, featuring the painting Mon Cheval by Martin Honisch, could be viewed as such a plan. The thick white letters of the question “WHAT DOES A HOUSE WANT?” juxtaposed with a deeply lined hand emanating from an organic pipe out of the abstract ground, chained to an ever-changing sky, speaks to the core of Geddes’ self-imposed task as poet. A ladder and a cowboy hat are propped up against the bottom of the page in the foreground. The man himself is noticeably absent. We see only his hand, chained to a rock or the sky, a wooden boat above, leading to mountains and the vast ocean. The lines on his hands are deep like veins.

……….The world has been my whale-road
……….wanderer and seafarer
……….among the lost manuscripts,
……….charting connections
……….few had even dreamed of …
……….Tennyson was right
……….about being part of all he met,
……….but he hadn’t met enough

Geddes ventures outwards and inwards. The more he becomes the other, the more he becomes himself. Ironically, for all his moving and shaking around as other people, at no point does Geddes ever become other than himself.

What Does A House Want? is a book brimming with life, experience, wisdom. For the most part, Geddes is generous, honest, exploring political motivations, personal behaviour, speculative possibilities about the metaphysics of space between worlds, the past and the future, the self and the other, the individual and the collective, the historical moment that is nowhere and everywhere, that is consciousness, that is the present speaking through the past, and the past speaking through the present.

……….Did I say that, or was it Master Bi?
……….He spoke so close to my ear as he applied
……….clay to mould my features that his ideas
……….invaded my brain as if I were a puppet.

Who is this mysterious “other” Geddes addresses, and who he speaks of as if it were his double? His book probes this ability to look outside to see inside. Most of Geddes’ poems in this collection are in fact written about others, or from another’s point of view. Significantly, Geddes adds excerpts of poems by other poets between his nine chapters, only to mix himself up all the more. It is as if Geddes is saying “I am the other.” And
yet, to be sure, Gary Geddes is always Gary Geddes. Thankfully, Ghandi, Trotsky, St Augustine, and other mysterious men of letters, for a short but significant period of time, get to be Gary Geddes too, as do compliant readers of his book.

……….Islanded in our separate
……….selves, words are
……….too frail a bridge

While in themselves words may be too frail to join one individual to another, by taking on the personae of multiple historical personalities, Geddes shows how they can be made to stretch out over time and space. In effect, he inspires us to think about world politics, current events, historical relevance, and most of all subjectivity. Remarkably, the wandering of Geddes’ personality, his “I-less” subjective home without a home, takes the poet on a journey which, through the other, returns back to himself.

David Swartz is a visual artist and writer from Toronto, currently living in Lisbon, Portugal, where he works as an English teacher and translator while studying painting at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon.

This review was published in issue 12:1. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Book review: Gail Scott’s The Obituary

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Gail Scott, Gail Scott review, montreal, poetry, poetry reading, prose, review, The Obituary by Gail Scott, Vallum, Writing

Ghosts of Identity by Lisa Sookraj

Gail Scott’s long-anticipated novel The Obituary is exemplary of the author’s strengths as a writer, and as a Montrealer. As always – her prose begs to be read as poetry because simply put, it is poetry in its most ethereal, advanced form. Scott’s work readily acknowledges this question on page 118: “Reader, you may be forgiven for asking here what is a novel life?”

The Obituary is beautiful, challenging poetic novel that is absolutely stunning in terms of image, sound, rhythm, merged with compelling characters and an extremely sensory depiction of place and atmosphere. Full of unconventional footnotes, brackets, symbols and crossed out words, the work itself is a complex equation to be cracked, or at least, to be pondered, much like life and identity. The narration is a fusion of three voices which bleed into each other – a woman named Rosine on a bed or bus, an erudite historian and a meticulously descriptive omniscient narrator.

The narrative is situated in Mile End – seeking to capture, (as Scott put it at the launch for the book) “the music of the way people talk in Montreal” and the particular resonance the city and its inhabitants have. She compared this intention to Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers.

Montreal street names that appear in the text are toyed with – transformed to be humorous and fresh. One example is the renaming of St. Joseph as Dada-Jesus. At the launch Scott talked about ‘sense of place’– a vital element of the novel; she has lived in Mile End since 1972 back when it was a working class immigrant neighbourhood, where as she put it, “everyone shared having to get up to go to work in the morning,” something that has certainly changed. The narrative is fascinated with the situation of life in the triplexes of Montreal,  the manner in which neighbours tend to intimately know about each other’s lives.  This is done in part through following a therapist MacBeth and his patients, who are neighbours.

At the launch the author discussed the integration of Abraham and Torok’s view of psychoanalysis which sees social context as important to shaping identity and psyche. At the book launch, Dr. Gillian Lane-Mercier suggested that the central issue of the novel can be summed up with this quote: “Who am we?” (p. 46) The Obituary plays with the idea that who you are is inextricably linked to who you identify with.

The novel begins with this epigraph: “What haunts us are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” – Abraham and Torok. Haunting is an important element of the novel that plays out as  ghosts of Old Montreal’s politics and ghosts of Rosine’s ancestors. The protagonist/narrator Rosine is distressed by her partly-indigenous family’s “internalized racism” and sense of shame.

The narrative is concerned with hybridity and struggling with identity– avoiding and/or accepting elements and notions of self, place and past. Rosine strives to find an authentic way of speaking. Words that are crossed out show her editing or censoring herself, trying to establish for herself what she is and isn’t able to, or should or shouldn’t be able to say.

Scott responded to a comment that her narrator may be seen as “someone who is falling apart” by saying she sees her as “someone with many seams.” I agree with this statement, though it’s also interesting to note how falling, or rather, carefully pulling apart can often be a precursor to fixing pieces together, to obtaining a sense of wholeness from fractions – which speaks to the structure of the text itself.

Lovely and brave, The Obituary has an uncommonly layered feel. The language is consistently playful, sensuous and tight. The world portrayed is full of vibrancy, an accumulation of delicious details infused with social commentary and facts. Although in one sense the novel can appear difficult to follow, it is  ultimately inviting, fun and a pleasure for the reader to inhabit. The Obituary is all the things that good writing, be it poetry or prose, should be.

You can purchase this title and others by Gail Scott at the Coach House Books website.