I’m getting to within 10 books of where I’m currently reading now.
149. Old Winter by Anne Le Dressay (Chaudiere, 2007)
Le Dressay has been a poet I’ve followed for nearly 2 decades, watching for specks. I like her cadence, her worldview, her development of ideas.
A reread. Funny how the poems I previously marked, I’m not sure why and poems I didn’t bookmark strike me more now. I bookmark different poems. Here, a meditation on the daily takes a deeper significance without feeling forced but like truth found by reflecting backwards inside the poem itself a piece of thought. Sometimes there seems to be too much meat around the nut of the poem but still the nut itself is insightful. For example.
p. 77
the In memorium card
your father hands out to all the staff
after the funeral.
Here you are, your photo, your name,
your age at time of death (18 years
and 5 months
[…] he came back to work brittle
and brave and tearless, as id required of men.
He gave us each a card with your photo.
Here you are, smiling in the sun
over 30 years later, still in the world
in some form. And that, perhaps,
is what your father wanted.
She keeps in these poems the habit of looping back with a finishing stitch to bind the poem’s knot. She persists in ending lines in mid-grammatical phrase to push it forward. It seems well enough done to be a functional choice, even though the line-end type often jars me, it doesn’t where she applies it.
These poems go in a long-reach back and point ahead as well. There’s something of a chronological order but I can’t hold it against them. One of the early poems gets at a larger truthiness. For some reason menstruation is a shame. Half the planet does its bloody business in silence. I remember talking with a male friend who had a poem which he considered violent and shocking because there was a blood in the toilet and I said that’s a quarter of women’s daily life, about as common as soap in a bathroom. I don’t read blood as violence. But maybe I was being obstinate as well. There is a violence to blood in hushed tones. To have a period and shame is the cause of kids who happen to be female quitting school. My aunt was told she had blood on her clothes as a little girl and she had no idea why. In a family of 14, no one gives a head up or explanation. A generation later, I thought a pad and strapping would be worn like a holster and my thigh would split open. My body looking ready a couple years before school got around to mentioning anything lucid.
So, all which is to say her poem, “First Blood” stuck me. She ends it with “First blood” and a matter-of-fact thought:Well, there it is“. Admitting powerfully in the poem, silence as the least safe thing.
150. Village of the Small Houses: A Memoir of Sorts by Ian Ferguson (Douglas & McIntyre, 2003) Well this won a comedy writing award. I’m not saying it didn’t have funny moments but it seems more like a grief memoir. It starts in high comedy and descends the whole way to end on a downbeat. It is tributes to people known, not just their lives but having to follow to death. Which is how my father used to talk. Mention someone, bookend it with how and when the person died. Actually, Hit by a Farm did that in the first few chapters two. This pet existed. And then it died this way. This relative told me such-and-such. That person died at this point. It’s a curious way of reveal. The Village is Fort Vermilion which was a native area through most of the book until tract-type homes were knocked up by land speculators and natives moved to city or deeper in the bush. 151. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (Delta Fiction, 1973) So Kilgore Trout gets paid to go to an arts festival in a cross road town by his only fan. Who is really quite unwell. There is a plot, of sorts. It oddly cross connects with the thriller novel, both having characters raised by the KKK. Black vs white is really trumpeted hard. More plot-driven in a way, more didactic of being against environmental degradation but in spots quite funny, such as the absurdity of his stories being used for text content, content not mattering, and illustrated with the normal porn images. Which strangely enough “beaver” being ubiquitous to the planet but terribly illegal to show when one is a human female even though it is common compared to the actual beaver which looks like: [and his drawing]. His drawing and explaining obvious things was quite odd and funny. My favourite page in the book was this: 
Although this was also beautiful:
152. Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn by Catherine Friend (Da Capo Press, 2006)
How could one not pick up a title like that?
This biography of two city-born lesbians who decided to start a sheep farm, and vineyard, with meat chickens, various poultry. Hubby rocked with laughter and cried at the tragicomedy of fears and mishaps and joys of new lambs.
It’s a pretty complete picture of farming without being a manual. It is about the relationship of the couple, about her relationship to writing and keeping sense of self, and not wanting her dream to die, and knowing her wife’s dream needs two people at least to get it up and running. Their happiness is intermeshed but how to get the details to not crash.
There’s buying chicks and maybe a gun for coyote-kills? There’s getting attached to animals you’ll eat and the straight-up learning curve.
Pretty captivating and, maybe with maggots on the prowl, I’d rather get me a goat tattoo than a farmyard of goats. (Close enough.)
153. Sleep is a Country by Anne Le Dressay (McGill-Queens University, 1997)
The first book I got of hers and it stands the test of time and reread. To put a lie to a couple times I recently said I basically don’t reread books. Except the ones I do, I guess.
The poems are in a private voice, not curating a community of stories. The scenes seems to be an act of thinking and processing, not a report after telling the reader what to think. They are internal voice and checking in with self of what was when at the cusp of change.
p. 62
“I am learning to think with my body,
to think past words to blood pulse
and breath rhythm,
to translate language into the pull of
muscle and tension of bone.”
Like McKay [next in list] lines often end mid-phrase or with an article but there is a logic of pressing and gushing foward, refusing closure just yet.
It is uniformly tight and with that balance of inner world and grounding in outer world. It is heavy with griefs and fears expressed so that by letting them go, they can be given room so they stop shoving. p. 56 “I walk alongside a hundred distresses/that do not belong to me./I walk aloof. I stay apart.//The distresses walk with me, demanding/attention. They are never absent./I know my aloofness is a life.” and over the poem it chooses to acknowledge rather than shut down and shut out “the pain seeps into my song,/a thousand distresses/singing.”
p. 51
“And then I knew I hated her.
And knowing,
took the rage
like a creature in my hands,
alive and livid and of my flesh,
and looked at it. And I saw
that it was older than she, as
old as my life, as old as
my father’s life.”
What a cadence. And if that doesn’t put a finger on epigenetic response, what does. This reactivity isn’t something to be sussed from my forgotten childhood, not from chemicals in the womb, not traced to my mother, but back generations. This thing that is my flesh is inheritance not a new fault.
The poems aren’t a simple loop but a coming to terms
“I said what I had never said
aloud: I hate”
And to fast forward through the poem
“gather up—clumsy, bent— the
pure blind hate, and I fashion it
like clay, breaking its bones and
forcing its flesh into the form
of a kneeling woman with
arms upraised, head thrown back
in a wail
like the keening of rock.
And I scoop from the earth
a place. Anf I bury,
praying: Stay buried.
And roll the weight of the mountains
over.”
A poet that can articulate your past or your future can help you with self-knowledge and show the advantage of literacy and literature.
What a powerful poem of resolving to make personal transformation. To admit the constant, its shame, to verbalize, to become the creator or the already created, Shiva figure, a creator/destroyer and then to make earth into earth and stone under stone. Suggesting the stone of Christ’s tomb, moving the mountain to Mohamed, suggesting the hatred which is sorrow at its heart will become complete it its sorrow and will become dead and buried but will resurrect. But at least, buried in the position, it may come back as praise instead.
154. Sanding Down this Rocking Chair on a Windy Night by Don McKay (M&S, 1987)
Holy lordie, this brain. How does this brain make things.
from Suckering the Silver Maples”, p. 21
“days when she rode the subway like the n
in Wednesday”
Or from “Without a Song”, p. 61
“in phone booths strung along the highway, frail
half-popsicles of light we’re
dying to bring someone closer while the wires between us
sag like midriffs and our captive voices
slip away into their element”
The beings of light cross-references with Karabekian’s painting in Breakfast of Champions. Or Star Trek’s transmuting to pure energy which happened after the poem’s publication. But people as half-popsicles goes somewhere I’ve never put. The cold, but the refreshing, but the oversweet, but the garish, but the half but the frail but the person in phone booth. It all twists to some new sensation.
He has a way of seeing and mashing up and putting side by side all kinds of scenes and language. There’s not a picking a tone and making it all “Internally consistent” according to micron measurement. All fits. Later books I’ve seen are much more homogenous to their loss.
The title poem is with a valley old timer in the speech of then and there, of dandelion wine and “I’ll tell ya Robert, this here infilation, it’s terrible. She was buying tomatoes in Cornwall, they wanted, what was it, something awful. And the meat. It’s enough to make a person quit meat altogether or go back to raising hogs” (p. 40)
But the train poem is the quintessential Canadian train poem: “Travelling east, we age more quickly,/running into time which travels/west. The train wants to be evening, wants that/blue grey wash of snow and sky/eliding the horizon”
“For Laurel Creek” is as hard-edged as that is soft-edged as it is drunk on sound and following the river thru all the human garbage and construction and its turbulent flow of words mimics the river,
“mallards are to duck
as dawg to dog, a concentration of the will to live.
As Homer’s ear drank sea-surge
drink its purlings and enriching chemicals
in rusty strains and rainbows. Catalogue the
shopping carts through which it strains,
the tires it sucks on like insoluble black
lifesavers.
Consider styrofoam’s uncanny negatives,
the death of substance gathering in the jetsam.
Survey the changing social status of the creek—
the way condos turn their backs,
erecting Frost Fence to protect the condomites,
while their backyards drain
discretely down the bak through plastic catheters; how it
passes through the university through quotation marks,
discoursing on the eighteenth century idea of landscape”
Did this book win awards? If any book should win awards, surely…