Ridley's Fallout

[Photo from Ridley’s Ottawa book launch in June]
Sandra Ridley‘s debut collection Fallout (Hagios, 2010) is one of those collections that accumulate. I could tell you lines that impacted but the impact in isolation would be meaningless. Rather like my babbling exclamations of major plot turns from a novel you haven’t read (but should). As in Miss Atomic, 1957 where the ending twists in an unanticipated direction.
The poetry collection isn’t built of a load-bearing stack of sound byte quips, or as JimK put it, built in the popular style of an overload “quirk-by-quirk surprises”. Although there are lines that stand alone and make one whistle, such as “Our failures have become the typical blur.” (p. 61) or from the Lift: Ghazals for C. chapbook which is rolled into this collection, “She cradles a nocturnal crescent, a lullaby moon.” (p.77)
Perhaps because it is Canadian we need to define it in terms of what it is not, rather than by what it is?
There’s no whimsy ruffles nor padded, baggy phrases. Each phrase counts and works but it is not so bare-bones that it feels harsh.
It talks about history and has a clear social criticism of nuclear testing and the impacts of it but doesn’t feel like an ideological waggling finger. The fallout from military is not just literal physical but social.
The language is not emotional and directive. It takes a hard positions on what to view and show. It is about showing not telling. Details are laid out, such as play by play of naive people pocketing shards of nuclear-bomb melted rocks as souvenirs, without judgement on the act. That is left to the reader to interpolate. This gives a respect for the intelligence of the reader.
The speech is vivid, crisp. Take the opening poem for example, p. 9

Funeral
First time the Officer rides in high style is four days after he dies.
His hearse is polished spotless, screw-you dignified,
reflecting the casualty he leaves behind.
She wears navy blue to spite him. No one looks at the lines she cut
into her hands. His affair’s denial stays unopened
in a clutch of his letters.
She presses a bouquet of tiger-lilies to her side.
Never given.
He said, flowers are for funerals.
The driver stumbles, fiddles with the latch on the hearse’s back-door.
She steps left to let the coffin slide out.
For a moment,
nothing else seems to happen,
but oh, does she miss him and regret.

There’s a sort of humour twisted in there. Even tho the speaker doesn’t move and doesn’t say a word aloud, there’s drama. Particicular details are pulled out, lined up. There’s an unapologetic stance. There’s grief but it balances without feeling maudlin because there’s spunk and spar in there. Thru the collection are these senses of strong women, defiant against events and people out of their control.
It does not feel confessional autobiographical in romantic female tragedy style, yet it has dark, hard subjects from a female point of view broadened out as human-scale. For example, individual vignettes such as this are set inside the context of the U.S. employing nuclear weapons testing. Between 16 July 1945 and 23 September 1992 the United States of America conducted (by official count) 1054 nuclear tests, and two nuclear attacks.
That would be into the planet’s common air, water and ground. Can we presume this had no fallout, literally?
As a society we quickly forget history and yet living memory extends to the 1920s, if we choose to not let the present overwrite the past.
In some families, stories of parents and grandparents are points of reference of oral history that can extend living memory to the mid-1800s. (I get that number from my hearing directly stories of my grandmother’s dad, my grandmother having been born in 1901.) Junot Diaz was talking about how memory still ripples out across decades. My summary of what he said included how he

stressed that ignoring something doesn’t make it disappear. The impact of the negative immigrant experience is still with us generationally. Boston Irish have one of the highest rates of alcoholism, suicide and violence in the U.S. and yet there’s no conversation about how that is the outcome of negative immigrant experience and being placed as an outsider in stereotypes.
Latin America, America, Europe, all have been shaped by the genocides and violence that we erase from our collective page histories but these historical actions still shape us on individual and cultural levels.

One gives a dignity to experience to not erase the hard bits and another level of dignity to not wallow and whine.
There’s this, and this, and this. Know this. And we keep moving.