Before the writers festival gets underway tonight, I want to mention this Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen reading upcoming. She’ll be featured at Tree on the 27th, overlapping with the last night of the fest.
Last week, her third collection of poems, Lean-To (Gaspereau Press) won the 2010 Atlantic Poetry Prize.
I’m curious about what the fuss is about and what she’s done lately. The National Post gives a sample from her latest book which I excerpt further below.
yellowed edges of news—horoscopes, obituaries, sports. Fool’s gold
in burlap, Yukon potatoes groping toward plaster. Boxes of puzzles,
boxes of maps—we’ve been on the grey grids—the chisel, the rule, the
balance and hammer, the vacuum.
Normal ad nauseam. The mind narrows its focus by inches. Listen: the
friction of thoughts on thought, concentrated, the colour of gasoline. A
dream of diesel and steam—runaway train—cargo of things registered
and ignored.
How did she get there?
Where was she before? Her first collection of poetry, Clay Birds, was 14 years ago. It was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, and won a Saskatchewan Book Award. Lorna Crozier blurbed that book to say “her emotional intensity and lyrical passion are mitigated by a clear-eyed original intelligence.”
That last part is especially promising to hear about anyone’s writings. Her first book had some poems that played in the sandbox of phonetic spelling like a less extreme bill bissett. Here’s part of her Fish Tales poems, from Th Fisherwoman,
Th Fisherwoman falls to er nees but she dont say grace. Th tales tired er. I carry er to bed + hold er hed wile she sips er soop. I hold er hed + sing er songs noing it was for me she tryed to hard to tell th tale.
Some other are more narrative autobiographical-feeling poems like Aunt Verna’s Children
Is it raining
or is Mother crying?
She turns on the radio
to hear
what she already knows.
I climb into the front seat.
My father turns on the wipers. Shh,
she says, go back to sleep.
Already I have forgotten
Aunt Verna’s face. Like her children
dreaming through gunshot,
waking bewildered.
I watch my mother’s face, trusting
she knows
I want only what Aunt Verna’s children want,
bewilderment and going back
to sleep.
Structurally it steps thru the story, widening what is in view with each turn. The drama is tender and intimate, confined to the size of a car seat airspace, child and parents and rain. There’s something going on and the child is subdued as the parents are. There’s a mystery and it is enough to know one doesn’t need to know the details. Which puts us as the audience in the position of the small child in it not needing to be in the know.
Is it true account or not? I don’t care. Would a child want to not know what’s going on when someone in their family died? That’s more of a concern. But the Mom cues close your mind. Shush, this is not for you and child obeys and sleeps in awareness and curiosity.
Another poem from there, Eclipse talks about that in Hawaii where, on the beach, people “feel calm/press down on the ocean, hold it/ in its bed for seven minutes, the whales/ still as air.”
What a dark image for within the eclipse, the placating calm and armageddon by asphyxiation in one thought. The whales on hold, and the coral picking can wait until the event every 150 year passes again. Most of a page away she continues and brings some leaps that bring the scene to her unseen father and a situating of the grief in a person and relationship.
My father is growing old.
There are things he has meant to say.
One hundred and fifty years is a long time.
I wait too, knowing I haven’t found all the shells
left behind, I haven’t finished Moby Dick
I don’t know my father’s story,
Like how her lines were end-stopped except when it was weighted pointedly to pop something out by enjambment. I appreciate the use of present perfect tense which gets turfed from poems in workshops as being wordy, rather than kept for being more precise.
Her second book, Ör, was published by Brick Books in 2003. It won a John V. Hicks Prize, was longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards and was shortlisted for a Pat Lowther Award.
The sample from Brick shows an intermediary stage of evolution between the current book and the first with subjects being more external, more use of sound play, keeping the ragged lengths of lines
Lost
thoughts, soot-lined, silver-lined
concatenations
incense of coal, cumulonimbus…
pennies and ponies on the track
heads or tails, a chance
the sleeper
lugged backwards through France,
honey-moon, lune de miel
suite, sigh, tunnel of
tickets and black gates, fate line rising from the luna mount
mind the gap a porter calls
and we cross, linked elbow to elbow
ghost cars sparking the synaptic tracks…
Quite different than the trends of her first book and from her most recent. That’s natural enough. Different influences. Different decade.
Life naturally shifts. If one were writing identically in one’s late twenties and one’s early forties, there might be some cause for concern. Would what one cares about not change? More experience collected. Different exposures to literature and life. At the time of the first book she was out west living with her husband. Now she’s down East and with husband and 3 sons.
The form of her poetry most recently (that first sample) with its prose-block of text and short phrases and playing more in discontinuity and a forward run of thoughts. It splashed in the river of some contemporary waters.
It gets me wondering if poetry as subject to fashion as architecture being dislocated from the local place and more influenced by the time?
The sample poem to the Tree site is invokes coyotes as does a poem in the first book. She moved from Saskatchewan to Halifax and still coyotes comes into the poems. (They get into one’s soul.) It’s also playing with disjunctures, prose poem, disconnect from personal heart narratives.
I suppose there’s no standard trend line. Some people start writing while unable to speak freely and some start freely and then play in the complex. It’s natural for writers to want to be somewhat autobiographical the be finished going thru that headspace and need new subjects at a faster rate than they can live. But then, some live fast, some slow. Some write fast, some slow. General patterns. They elude.
I’ll end with a quote from Torontoist’s Optimisms Project “I’m often labelled an optimist but prefer to describe myself as hopeful. I will be disappointed. To suggest otherwise dilutes life’s complexities into a pablum of self-help books and cheap heart glyphs. I crave the poetics of flux” – Christine McNair
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