Currently Reading: Dipping into Dealing

It would be oversimplifying to say the books have a great deal in common more than being recent and in my head simultaneously but cross-connections spontaneously form for our brains are pattern-makers.
The Best of It: New and Selected, Kay Ryan (Grove Press, 2010), p. 92, “Connections”

Connections lie in wait—
something that in
the ordinary line of offenses
make offense more great.
They entrap, they solicit
under false pretenses,
they premeditate.
They tie one of
your shoelaces
to one of a stranger,
they tie strings to purses
and snatch as
you lean down, eager
for a little something gratis.

That said, most of these books on the top of the desk this week have a thread through most of them about rejigging how to thrive in the wake of loss that runs thru them. Each life is a set of strategies of how to navigate one’s way thru this life-thing.
the sorrow and the fast of it, nathalie stephens (Nightboat, 2007), p. 28-29

Every distance is a walkable distance.
The city designed a body of conjecture. A body of seemingly. Took the splinter of grief and laid it alongside the iron railings, the steel spikes, the concrete reefs. Grafted that relief onto a sublimated geography. Made distance decisive, unmysteried. Pushed what was splayed in deep. Wanted for a certainty. A fantasy for free.
So walk with me. To the cut edge of winter. To the carved out memory of sleep. Set fire to the cities welling out of me.

Her poetry is so dense and powerful. It runs forward with a momentum that can pull me straight thru a book in a straight run. She pushes together the concrete with the abstract and makes a kind of sense that is oblique yet feels deep. It reaches in somewhere in a way I can’t explain or account for. If I read a third book from her, maybe I’ll get closer to understanding the mechanism of what she’s doing.
Fallout, Sandra Ridley (Hagios, 2010) (She’s a Saskachewan Book Awards nominee and on panel at Writers fest Oct 25), p. 51, from “Split”

The night you left was a city night –
a sky empty except or the most insistent star
asserting its distance.
You left a note on the table.
Your words sounded more permanent
the more I repeated them.
This is enough.
My response was to mix brown sugar with eggs
with butter,
bake your favorite cookies.
I found your note first. Then a closet without clothes,
a desk without a computer.
What is unintended is easily left,
but that is a digression. You needed persuading,
I thought.
I poured black strap molasses out of the box.
I like my fingers sticky.

There’s something comparable in how she tells. It’s like a Japanese hedge garden. Each turns gives a vantage point reveals some part of something while what you passed is concealed and the game is assembling the implications in your head. There’s something crushing and powerful about the scene. The speaker realizes there’s nothing to do yet one has to do something. Feelings are getting as mixed as the batter as the what now settles around the room.
This hot place, Bernadette Wagner (Thistledown 2010) (Saskachewan Book Awards nominee and at Dusty Owl Nov 7) p. 36 “Overheard”

Looks like she’s had one too many
he said and I follow
his glare to the large woman
standing several steps ahead. She licks
the pink and brown streams running
off three cones while auburn
strands whorl her head, wrap
her full and round breasts, twine
around her trunk and thick thighs, around
hips wide enough to deliver a whole world.
Three children circle her, small hands clutching candy,
broad smiles on their ice cream painted faces.
Their dancing makes me
yearn to share chocolate.

Did you pump your fist too? That down the nose attitude that seems to be haughtily thrown around needs to be met toe-to-toe. Having gone into a bakery and got a sniff from the clerk that I certainly didn’t look as though I needed their product, this poem really resonates. I love how she re-writes the narrative of what the woman looks like, not someone to be judged but sees her strength and sees past the disparagement that could take the moment down and dismisses that and enters the joy in the scene, putting emphasis where it is useful and beautiful.
Nobody Move, Susan Stenson (Sononis, 2010) p. 89, “Qualms”

Tell yourself what matters.
It probably is time to sit
in the chairs you dragged
three blocks from Rosie’s
garage sale to the back
to the front to the back
of the garden. Tell yourself
it’s not the end of the world.
Falling and landing here.

This poem locked in within that repetition enacted in the moving the chair back and forth. What to do with oneself. Useless keep busywork. Soothe yourself, council, rather than work oneself oneself up to some symbolic tizzy of deep cosmic meaning. Acknowledge qualms and the messedupness and vow to go on. That’s a pretty uncommon message in a world of paper-cut ending and trauma promotion.
Obituary of Light: The Sangan River Meditations, Susan Musgrave (leaf press, 2009), p. 41, “ix”,

The moon-colored stones
you piled high above the tide line—
in the morning they are still there.
Even the river stealing past
in the darkest night becomes another way
for grace to slip through.

Her journey seems to be at a delicate point. Many of the poems are quietly insistant on self-comfort yet not going a route of sure answers but opening outwards. The context of the poem comes out of time (according to book cover) when her friend had recently died. She picks her way carefully through words and beach and readings of Rumi for solace.
Cantilevered songs, John Lent, (Thistledown, 2009) p. 31, from “Home”

And I accept its rootlessness
as an ache that will not retreat and gnaws
at the edges of movement and side-
ways glances; as difficult as it might be,
I accept its shifting, crazy balancing
act in the names of the blood that
dreamed me. This wilderness is
my home.
And the vertigo? A good thing
in many ways, to be off-
balanced by these textures
and this light

The poems in this book run for long lines and long thoughts and waves so it’s hard to excerpt but this gives a little sense of what’s going on. He’s got a wonderful musical cadence. The story told to self and to any other self that will listen comes down on the side of, wait, this is to be expected, feeling uncertain, feeling disorienting grief but I recommit to choosing this. There’s a rationality meshed with a body sensory tie that makes for wonderfully absorbing runs of ideas.
Sweet, Dani Couture (Pedlar, 2010), p. 22, “Proof”

Repetition is religion for paranoids —
self-doubters counting raptors
along country roads. Faith is strong
as long as there are birds to count.
Ten red-tailed hawks in a row enough
to send me to the altar.
A farm post — kiss its weathered skin,
pray for one more, one more.
One more.

Dani Couture is another new-to-me writer and her poems are the most varied of these books. She plays, is sometimes blunt and usually lively. There are some internal poems, like the one above, some journalistic, such as one describing a homeless person in a subway some humourous such as Circus. The books is described as “a gravity-clutched leap into the uncertain future”. She seems to jump into poems with full verve and nerve.
The Porcupinity of the Stars, Gary Barwin (Coach House, 2010), (He’s reading in Ottawa Nov 12) p. 61, “Brick”

I will take care of the brick
because it came through my window
it is a damaged bird
unable to fly
I will make a safe bed for it
as I would help any broken thing
the truncated dove of a hand
the message that told me run

The poems in this collection vary in subject and style too so one poem doesn’t seem representative. Some are non-sequitur, turn-driven like ghazals, some surreal, some stories of family or image of a semaphore man.
But in this piece, how elegantly minimalist, yet with such unexpected turns in there. The tenderness and plain language is still not straightforward. Is it compassion self-aware of absurdity of overruling the threat? Or is the absurdity the threat? The solution to the issue of dealing with difficulty is also one of acknowledging and downplaying, not taking it however it is delivered, like Wagner’s poem. It’s a persevering rather than romanticizing and dramatizing. For example, p. 26 “evertheless”, “I laugh whether or not the gobsmacked laugh — […] because if luck filters pretty things/and fate gives us broken hands[…]/ still the beautiful laughter remains/dusky and firefly/left with the ashes”.