Tag: poetry

11. Louise B. Halfe–Sky Dancer, Burning in This Midnight Dream

It’s March. At this time in the semester, I can’t read (or reread) anything unless it’s something I’m teaching. This week, my students and I begin talking about Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream, so I got to reread this wonderful book.

Wonderful, yes, but also horrifying. These poems are scalding, a mosaic of the direct and intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools. They are personal, even confessional, although they don’t only reflect Halfe’s own experience at Blue Quills IRS in St. Paul, Alberta, not far from Saddle River Cree Nation, where she grew up; they also speak of the poisonous effects Blue Quills had on her parents and grandparents.

The volume is divided into sections which are marked by family photographs. The mostly carefree smiles in them act as a counterpoint to the description of family relationships in the poems. Not all of those relationships are damaged by residential school and colonialism, but many are, which is a sign of what Jo-Ann Episkenew describes as the “psychological terrorism” that creates the post-colonial traumatic stress response we see in these poems.

These poems are hard to read, but if they were easy to read, if they didn’t provoke anger and deep sadness, they wouldn’t be much good. What other emotions should a genocide, especially one practiced on children, generate in us?

And these poems are good. Better than good. Marvellous. Filled with pain, but free from self pity, as in the second stanza of the opening poem, “Dedication to the Seventh Generation”:

Sit by the kotawân–the fire place.
Drink muskeg and mint tea.
Hold your soul
but do not weep.
Not for me, not for you.
Weep for those who haven’t yet sung.
Weep for those who will never sing.

Silence is a recurring theme in these poems, almost a motif, which makes so much sense, since those institutions were intended to silence the children incarcerated in them. Halfe, thankfully, sings in these poems, in English and in Plains Cree, which is usually translated (where it isn’t, you can use the itwêwina online dictionary if you need to). Let’s be grateful for these poems, and for their author, who has taken such risks by publishing this book.

You might decide to take my thoughts with a grain of salt. Louise Halfe is a friend, and I’m a huge fan of her poetry, so yes, I might be biased. I’ll tell you what: find a copy of Burning in This Midnight Dream in the library, either the first edition, published by the late, great Coteau Books, or the new edition, republished by Brick Books, and try it out. My guess is that you’ll agree with my evaluation.

7. Debora Greger, Off-Season at the Edge of the World

One of my students, a talented poet, is working on a project influenced by Debora Greger’s Off-Season at the Edge of the World, and she lent me her copy so we could discuss it. Of course, I’ve been slow turning to it–this semester is, well, overwhelming–and she needs me to return it. The good news today was that invigilating a make-up midterm gave me an opportunity to read it, finally. The even better news is that this book is wonderful.

Off-Season at the Edge of the World is more than 30 years old. I had never heard of its author, who taught English at the University of Florida and won all kinds of awards. If the rest of her writing is like this, she deserved the accolades. The poems tend to be in tight stanzas–couplets, tercets, quatrains–with subtle patterns of sound and surprising metaphors. Take the poem “Three Graces,” for instance, which comes with the subtitle “after Canova”:

In the dim tent they are dimmer still,
three elephants chained by the leg
one to the next, one to the ground.

Fogbound oceans, they ebb and surge
in a leathery tide. Lost in a rhythm
not even feeding stops, they rock again

the black hold of a freighter
tossed on open seas, the dark portholes
of their unblinking eyes unfathomable.

The tattered maps of their ears
flick away the local flies.
Nothing to them our incurious stares,

having no use for us who neither
feed them nor let them go.
There is no grace as dark as theirs.

That extended metaphor of these circus animals (why else would they be in a tent?) as the sea, their movements as the tide, their eyes “unfathomable”–I wish I could write like that. And the last line! Wow.

I don’t know how my student ran across Greger’s poems, but I’m grateful that she shared them with me.

42. Michael Trussler, 10:10

A book titled '10:10' by Michael Trussler, featuring a white cover with circular images and text, placed on a wooden surface.

I haven’t been reading much for a couple of years, and that’s bothered me–a lot. The reasons aren’t hard to understand. I’ve been working too much and not sleeping enough, which has meant that when I get home, I’m too tired to concentrate. I still don’t get enough shuteye, but my job has eased up a little, and so I’ve been able to get at a few of the new books that have found their way into our house. Yes, even though I’ve struggled to read anything, I’ve still been buying books; I know that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s one of the things writers do.

I ordered Michael Trussler’s 10:10 when it came out last fall. Michael is a colleague and a friend, and I admire his writing. It’s erudite, thoughtful, concerned with the ways we are damaging the planet and ourselves, our horrific histories of genocide, and yet it also takes visual art–Vermeer, Rothko, Brueghel–as a sign of our potential, as a species, to do good things, to make beautiful things. Unlike me, Michael doesn’t seem to struggle to find time or energy to read, if the dense texture of allusions and quotations in 10:10 is any evidence–and it is. I’ve been meaning to read this book for a year, and I was finally motivated to open it when I learned, early yesterday morning, that it has been shortlisted for a Governor-General’s Literary Award. Yes, of course, many worthwhile books don’t get that kind of recognition, and yet I am so happy that Michael’s work is being recognized. He’s been prolific over the past several years, publishing three books of poetry and a memoir since 2021, and I know how much hard work and sacrifice has gone into that productivity. I knew 10:10 was on the shelf at work where I keep poetry, and I brought it home last night. I ended up devouring it in one sitting. It is a wonderful book.

The title made me think about time–Timex watches used to always be advertised with the hands showing “10:10,” and that’s true of other analog timepieces as well–and sure enough, the passing of time, and the way it is experienced in simultaneous layers, are both themes here. That simultaneity is hard to evoke in writing, since language tends to be linear (one word, one sentence, following another), but Michael plays with punctuation, enjambment, and textual interruptions of various kinds to suggest the way he might be sitting in his home office, writing, while remembering standing outside the building where Dutch diarist Etty Hillesum, who was murdered in Auschwitz, lived, while also recalling things she wrote about the experience of living in Nazi-occupied Holland. “The Edges of What’s Known?” includes lines from other poems or essays in the book–I’ve learned from Tanis MacDonald not to force genre categories onto hybrid texts, and I’m going to be careful not to make this mistake here–as another way to indicate a slightly different form of simultaneity. But that’s not exactly what 10:10 means. It’s a reference to Edward Kienholz’s large 1965 installation The Beanery, a life-size interior of a bar in which all of the human figures have clock faces, set to ten minutes after ten, where their actual fleshly faces would otherwise be. The title essay/poem, “10:10,” recalls different visits to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where Kienholz’s installation is located, in different decades of the author’s life, and it considers how his relationship to visual art has changed over time, as well as its connection, however oblique, to human violence: the war in Vietnam, the Holocaust. It ends with a couple of lines of poetry that interrupt a story about a 2014 visit to the Stedelijk, lines that seem to situate the text right here, in Regina, on a wintery day, far from Amsterdam, and yet on the following page we see a photograph (the author’s photographs appear at key points in this book) of a canal in that European city, “impossibly far from / here–.” Complexity, simultaneity, violence, and visual art as a kind of compensation: it’s all here.

So too are the climate crisis and the extinction event humans are causing, notably in “Solastalgia.” That title refers to Glenn Albrecht’s neologism, a word that combines nostalgia, solace, and desolation, or so I learned in a poetry workshop this week; it’s the sense of loss we experience when a place or ecosystem has been destroyed by human activity. The fragments in that text juxtapose different moments in Michael’s life, all of them suggesting the inexorable and accelerating passage of time, the need to love what remains NOW, because it’s leaving: “Better order now, the sky recommends, restaurant’s closing.”

I could go on about this book, which to be honest deserves a better, more skilled reader of poetry than I am. The winners of the Governor-General’s Literary Awards will be announced in a couple of weeks. I haven’t read the other nominees–that would be a worthwhile project, wouldn’t it?–and so I have no idea how 10:10 compares to them, but I’m happy that yesterday’s news prompted me to bestir myself to read it. Congratulations, Michael–you deserve the recognition.

29. David Orr, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong

I bought David Orr’s The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong in Otis and Clementines, a used bookstore in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia, which also facilitates cat adoptions and has a café. The book looked interesting for three reasons. I had recently skimmed an article about Robert Frost in The New Yorker, in which I learned about the widespread perception of Frost as a “monster,” something Orr traces to the discord between Frost and his first biographer, Lawrance Thompson, whose three-volume work is, Orr writes, “scathing toward Frost , worse . . . scathing without quite seeming to want to so.” For more than 50 years, Thompson’s version of Frost dominated thinking about the poet, as if in response to way he was lionized while he was alive. Second, I was curious about how Orr might fill an entire book—a short one, but still—with a discussion of one 20-line poem. And, finally, I was at the end of a 100-kilometre walk, and I realized “The Road Not Taken” is, at the most superficial level, a poem about a walk. That’s the context of the decision that the speaker makes between the two roads—something that would’ve been obvious to its first readers, but which we might be likely to miss since few of us walk anywhere these days. The “traveler” who chooses the road that “was grassy and wanted wear / Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same” was on foot, and the “step” that hadn’t darkened the leaves covering either road would’ve been human, had it existed. Those lines in the poem’s second and third stanzas show, as Orr notes, that the speaker’s claim to have chosen “the one less traveled by” makes little sense. Those two roads, as generations high school valedictorians and advertisers have missed, appear more or less identical, according to the speaker’s description of them.

That detail is only one of the poem’s perhaps surprising complexities. Orr works through it carefully in a chapter that’s a masterpiece of close reading. He also situates the poem within Frost’s life and particularly his friendship with the English poet Edward Thomas, who apparently provided Frost with a reason for writing it. But Orr’s take on “The Road Not Taken” goes beyond the poem itself into the idea of individual choice in America culture and the interdisciplinary field of choice, which I didn’t realize existed, and philosophical perspectives on the self. Does the self exist as a “unified, continuous entity,” as most of us experience ourselves, or is philosopher Derek Parfit’s argument “that we have no self at all, but merely an overlapping succession of mental states” closer to the truth? What role does our cultural framework play in our senses of who we are? Throughout these discussions, Orr continues bringing Frost and “The Road Not Taken” into consideration, as if Frost had anticipated them in his poem.

The book’s epilogue thinks about the crossroads as an emblem of decision-making: it’s, following anthropologist Victor Turner, a liminal space characterized by paradox, duality, performance, and metaphor—the latter both suggestive of doubleness, since a performer both is and isn’t the role they play, and “a metaphor joins two terms so that they both are and aren’t each other.” Performance and metaphor, Orr contends, are “the great engines” of Frost’s poetry, and he is thus “the great poet of the liminal,” whose “natural terrain is the unsettled intersection of opposing paths.” This is all very interesting, but Orr missteps, I think, when he tries to extend the idea of liminality to the United States as a “threshold nation” where immigrants are offered new beginnings. That’s too broad a statement, and in Trump’s America, it’s factually incorrect to say about the majority of newcomers. The exceptions are white South Africans, it seems. All others are subject to arbitrary deportation. Too bad Americans decided to take that particular road. I hope they make a different decision, collectively, at the next place where their road diverges.

9. Kayla Czaga, Midway

My colleague, Medrie Purdham, suggested Kayla Czaga’s work to me some time ago, and last night I finally got around to reading Midway. I want to call it a delightful book, although I’m afraid that the subject matter–most of the poems focus on the death of Czaga’s father and her grief–doesn’t lend itself to the word “delightful.” The poems are wonderful, though–full of surprises and comedy. The book’s first poem, “The Hairbrush,” neatly sets the tone: her late father’s hairbrush, “Matted with hair,” is described in a series of inventive metaphors before its concluding stanza: “Here, she said, handing it to me, / Go grow yourself a new dad.” The notion of a hairbrush as a packet of seeds, of individual hairs as potential replacements for the lost parent, made me chuckle-grunt in surprise. I made the same sound as I read the rest of this book. I have another of Czaga’s books at home, and I’m looking forward to reading it, too. In the meantime, though, thanks, Medrie, for introducing me to a writer I hadn’t known about before.