Today's book of poetry: Bit Parts for Fools. Peter Richardson. Icehouse Poetry. Goose Lane Editions. Fredericton, New Brunswick. 2013.
Peter Richardson is pulling our legs in a rather spectacular fashion. One would have to search high and low, near and far, to find poetry as entertaining and flamboyant as that found in Bit Parts for Fools.
These are poems that demand you read them two or three times, for the fun of it of course, but also for clarity. Richardson's exuberance is our reward in these richly textured works.
Professor Jacobsen Discourses on Another
Aspect of His Made-up Language
The words for today are broischni hydranya.
Saying them in your mind, you find
you can either be compassionate
or ruthless. It depends on tone.
If you growl the Slavic-sounding phrase,
broischni hydranya, several men
will be bound and gagged
and lowered into a freezing river.
If you soften your voice, the locution
will spare enemy officers
and send them to a field hospital
to recover in clean linen.
This language where tone controls meaning,
and meaning, the lives of ex-occupiers,
can it pull the dying from boxcars
and reinstate them in a ghetto?
Even as you stormed the one bridge
to this ruined plaza — your makeshift
command post in the roofless opera —
works of art were being carried away.
But among these few captured
enemy reservists, some are polyglots
and they will be pitching their ears
to hear how words will exit your mouth.
...
Richardson is completely committed to the universe of each poem. The infinite galaxy of his imagination is only limited by what the reader can take in. Richardson constructs the world that each poem inhabits as this were all his playground, and language something he made up to amuse himself.
In a Belgrade Hotel Lift
To move the cabin, push the button for the wishing floor.
If the cabin should enter more persons, each person
should press the number of wishing floor.
Driving is then going by national order.
If you are from Bulgaria you will be driving soon.
Leave complaining to the Americans.
They are far down the list after Rarotonga.
Anyway, control panels such as these
will not alleviate a slivovitz hangover.
Foot traffic creaks in an adjacent stairway
accessible through the staff lounge.
Passes may be secured at the front desk.
Please give the phonetic equivalent
to the words Roman marsh in Estonian
written in non-Cyrillic letters behind the bar.
Distances will be called out in metres.
Weights and counterweights obey old gears.
Each may eventually attain his or her wishing floor.
...
Bit Parts for Fools is like an intelligent boulder rolling down a steep hill - but in total control of itself, speed, direction and intention. These poems steam roll over the reader, the subjects hardly matter as everything is being illuminated with a razor lens, a very sharp pencil.
August Scene at Spyros Inlet Resort
Corinthian shin guards fallen from a trireme in an ancient
naval war
would entice a small man floating above sunken keels on a
dawn dip
to dive down google-eyed over cordage and hull plates from
our era
and not what was spoken of by the bogus archaeologist at
the taverna,
but instructive to a tycoon lately up from Athens on a
fortnight spree,
who can chat up the locals, greet the sun beside a sylph a
third his age
and lust for antiquities in a capsized scow, before shooting
chest pains
send him angling slack-bellied for his yacht with a prayer
and a vow.
She springs to her feet, scurries to the bow ladder, yelping
his name,
all legs and hips in that thong she wears, hands clamped to
her ears,
ears he adorned with black pearls last night over an ouzo
nightcap
after she suggested they go skinny-dipping in the hotel-spa's
pool.
He promises the gods he will sit at that pool and write out
a cheque
for a library, oh, yes, a library, to be staffed by the
unemployed poor
of this backwater, for its motorbike crazies, who roar along
its roads,
if his left arm can stop going numb, if she will trust her own
strength
and reach down the bow ladder a bit, if he can do more than
clutch
at the hand reefed in so all he can do is wave at its
periwinkle nails.
...
Peter Richardson rattles off wise gems like a gone mad jeweller giving away his wares. These poems are wicked tight and packed with startling images and incandescent language.
Sunrise Excision
It's sweet, this bandage that floats from your ribcage today
and the way you manage to look aghast but not pained
in the room whose louvered windows mute the light.
You sense that your lungs harbour a scabbed lymphoma
daily diminishing since you began the exercise of opening
a rabbit hutch door in your chest. A mea-culpa-like tap
enables you to insert your right hand into the beehive
of cells clumped beside your heart and to further note
that as the stinking maroon cloth emerges, another
lump located under your left shoulder blade begins now
to shrink restoring you to the facsimile of someone
able to stand the sight of himself in a bathroom mirror,
someone less fearful of dying this week as the putrid gauze
piles into your hands and you take a whiff of clotted blood,
declaring what your body has produced sweet as the plunder
of bees nesting in crags above a shoreline of dirty syringes.
...
"Anything will travel if you clap on wheels" is a line from Richardson's poem Sven Takes to His Rollerblades. It may be Richardson's mantra. He can slap the wheels onto any subject and the next thing you know it's racing past us with vigor, elan and considerable speed.
Do you get the impression I liked this book? These poems are not what I traditionally champion — but perhaps I am learning. I'm not certain I felt smarter after reading this book but I certainly felt happier for the experience.
Porch Coronary
For the second or so his brain stays bathed
in the necessary projection room electrics
he travels forward to this cloudy evening,
to the pale beverage tipping from his hand,
the floor rushing up, the outflux of breath,
to a bit of scalp nicked by vinyl clapboard
but not before reviving a Forties childhood
himself with mumps then the Saturday Post
cover of him ogling a limited edition stamp
whose provenance he can't recall as scenes
fly by too fast for him to subordinate them
to his wishes under a fleet of mauve clouds.
But surely it doesn't work that way. No one
believes the load of crap about a life's film
flashing before the eyes of the free-falling
alpinist or the hapless motorist ten metres
from smacking granite. There's a gonging
by way of closing credits. A crash of static
clearing pixels from the screen. No rushes
dedicated to childbirth or a family opening
its solstice gifts, just whirling phosphenes
lighting a sky that moments ago produced
stories this husband and father could swear by
who now doesn't know a comet from a glove.
...
Bit Parts for Fools by Peter Richardson is an immensely rewarding read. Can't recommend it highly enough.
www.gooselane.com
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Children of Air India: Un/Authorized Exhibits and Interjections – Renee Sarojini Saklikar
Today's book of poetry: Children of Air India: Un/Authorized Exhibits and Interjections. Renee Sarojini Saklikar. A Blewointment Book. Nightwood Editions. Gibsons, British Columbia. 2013.
This book is a sustained and articulate banshee scream, a well written wail against injustice, silence and indifference. Saklikar brings together all the research concerning Air India Flight 182 and imbues it with the emotional toll, the frantic pull of the heart, of a parent, a sibling, who must face the unthinkable horror and loss.
Introduction
This is a work of the imagination.
This is a work of fiction, weaving fact in with the fiction,
merging subject-voice with object-voice, the "I" of the author,
submerged, poet-persona: N––
who loses her aunt and uncle in the bombing of an airplane: Air India Flight 182.
This is a sequence of elegies. This is an essay of fragments:
a child's battered shoe, a widow's lament ––
This is a lament for children, dead, and dead again in representations. Released.
This is a series of transgressions: to name other people's dead, to imagine them.
This is a dirge for the world. This is a tall tale. This is sage, for a nation.
This is about lies. This is about truth.
Another version of this introduction exists.
It has been redacted.
...
Saklikar is relentless and fearless as she forces aside the multi-layered curtains of a world that doesn't want to know. There is a deft tenderness to many of these poems but it always girded within the fist of hard rebuke.
Exhibit (1985): fourteen, eleven.
His brother excels––French, English, math, science––
he takes a paper route,
buys milk when an old woman offers two dollars
with the coins he fetches a carton,
holds it, high––
Father: You took her money? She's an old lady.
Son: But Dad, she gave me, she gave––
I ran all the way.
Father: Take the money back.
He slow-walks
to the woman's house.
*
Before the car drives away, before the plane takes off––
this paper-route boy
lags behind in his home––
everyone is waiting––
he touches each piece of furniture,
goodbye sofa, goodbye lamp––
His arm brushes
against a locked door.
*
Status: It is his brother's body, found.
*
When she hears the news about her paper-route boy, the old woman––
the woman, old,
when she hears the news––
...
Renee Sarojini Saklikar lost family in the tragedy and you feel the personal loss, that hole that never gets filled. But Saklikar is never saccharine or maudlin, instead she moves forward with her voice in full song as she tackles the litany of sorrows.
These poems are sometimes lists, legal documents with redacted, crossed out sections. Saklikar melds all these fragments, the fractured data, the emotional girth, and gives us an indictment, a Kaddish, a funeral prayer, a howling denial of what is represented as the truth.
interjection
"...a twelve-year-old boy, darling of the house, so pampered ... suddenly turned
into an orphan with very few good and honest relatives ... very hard for me ... to
explain all these years ... grew up learning how mean this world ... none of the
governments ... ever cared to ask ..."
Witness No. [redacted]––Name [redacted]
Air India Inquiry
...
This is brave stuff to be sure and Renee Sarojini Saklikar is as fearless as she is frantic to justice served. As a debut collection this is dazzling work. Children of Air India should become a book we are all familiar with.
Exhibit: "Yes, that's what I said. It didn't sound like a bomb."
Look, I've taken early retirement. Ask my lawyer.
Sorry, don't mean to sound rude. It's just––
haven't we been over this enough times?
I was doing my job, proud of my work.
Yes. Yes. How many times have we gone over,
this, sitting and then,
sound––
just rocked me
over––
I mean the force,
the thing exploded and I fell out
my seat, the whole car jolted.
Was there any smell? There may have been. I can't recall. Not anymore.
I was one of the few women hired, you know, it wasn't always easy.
Of course I took it seriously. Followed him all the way from Vancouver, right?
...
www.nightwoodeditions.com
This book is a sustained and articulate banshee scream, a well written wail against injustice, silence and indifference. Saklikar brings together all the research concerning Air India Flight 182 and imbues it with the emotional toll, the frantic pull of the heart, of a parent, a sibling, who must face the unthinkable horror and loss.
Introduction
This is a work of the imagination.
This is a work of fiction, weaving fact in with the fiction,
merging subject-voice with object-voice, the "I" of the author,
submerged, poet-persona: N––
who loses her aunt and uncle in the bombing of an airplane: Air India Flight 182.
This is a sequence of elegies. This is an essay of fragments:
a child's battered shoe, a widow's lament ––
This is a lament for children, dead, and dead again in representations. Released.
This is a series of transgressions: to name other people's dead, to imagine them.
This is a dirge for the world. This is a tall tale. This is sage, for a nation.
This is about lies. This is about truth.
Another version of this introduction exists.
It has been redacted.
...
Saklikar is relentless and fearless as she forces aside the multi-layered curtains of a world that doesn't want to know. There is a deft tenderness to many of these poems but it always girded within the fist of hard rebuke.
Exhibit (1985): fourteen, eleven.
His brother excels––French, English, math, science––
he takes a paper route,
buys milk when an old woman offers two dollars
with the coins he fetches a carton,
holds it, high––
Father: You took her money? She's an old lady.
Son: But Dad, she gave me, she gave––
I ran all the way.
Father: Take the money back.
He slow-walks
to the woman's house.
*
Before the car drives away, before the plane takes off––
this paper-route boy
lags behind in his home––
everyone is waiting––
he touches each piece of furniture,
goodbye sofa, goodbye lamp––
His arm brushes
against a locked door.
*
Status: It is his brother's body, found.
*
When she hears the news about her paper-route boy, the old woman––
the woman, old,
when she hears the news––
...
Renee Sarojini Saklikar lost family in the tragedy and you feel the personal loss, that hole that never gets filled. But Saklikar is never saccharine or maudlin, instead she moves forward with her voice in full song as she tackles the litany of sorrows.
These poems are sometimes lists, legal documents with redacted, crossed out sections. Saklikar melds all these fragments, the fractured data, the emotional girth, and gives us an indictment, a Kaddish, a funeral prayer, a howling denial of what is represented as the truth.
interjection
"...a twelve-year-old boy, darling of the house, so pampered ... suddenly turned
into an orphan with very few good and honest relatives ... very hard for me ... to
explain all these years ... grew up learning how mean this world ... none of the
governments ... ever cared to ask ..."
Witness No. [redacted]––Name [redacted]
Air India Inquiry
...
This is brave stuff to be sure and Renee Sarojini Saklikar is as fearless as she is frantic to justice served. As a debut collection this is dazzling work. Children of Air India should become a book we are all familiar with.
Exhibit: "Yes, that's what I said. It didn't sound like a bomb."
Look, I've taken early retirement. Ask my lawyer.
Sorry, don't mean to sound rude. It's just––
haven't we been over this enough times?
I was doing my job, proud of my work.
Yes. Yes. How many times have we gone over,
this, sitting and then,
sound––
just rocked me
over––
I mean the force,
the thing exploded and I fell out
my seat, the whole car jolted.
Was there any smell? There may have been. I can't recall. Not anymore.
I was one of the few women hired, you know, it wasn't always easy.
Of course I took it seriously. Followed him all the way from Vancouver, right?
...
Wade Compton, Joanne Arnott
Michael Turner and Renee Sarojini Saklikar discuss poetry.
www.nightwoodeditions.com
Monday, October 14, 2013
Petrarch - Tim Atkins
Today's book of poetry: Petrarch. Tim Atkins. Book Thug: New British Poets Series No. 2. Toronto, Ontario. 2013
Tim Atkins' Petrarch from Book Thug's New British Poets Series is edited by Stephen Collis and Amy De'Ath. If the quality of this read is any indication of what is to follow we are all in for a big treat. This chapbook pops and spits and crackles in your hands while you are trying to read it. If this is what they are doing in Britain then I want to see more of it.
253
to J.S.with L.
In England or Hobbiton & in denial of my age
now that summer has been sold off
Without dividend from whatever privatized public service
deigns to lease my leg to the national grid & then charge
for it
After 300 years of being Japanese
In the process of giving up wishing for the rewards
of a poetry written towards a ship made of bricks
Or of 'literal' fulfilment having been closer than
most hairdressers to both
In a taxi back from a fortnight's canapes & quality time
with chinchillas at a conference on Karl Marx
Let me state although it is late –
To be a poet is to hitch-hike 5000 miles in a kayak in order
to see
A jar in Tennessee Rioting Inna me khaki suit-an-t'ing
In Godalming
Selling out is the new
keeping it real Unhappy for 3/4 of a haircut
We always fall into the
Utopian Camp Poets
If you want to fix the world go to Wall St.
...
Tim Atkins is quite unlike anyone else I've encountered, the mix of styles, his range, his humour –
these poems, ostensibly a translation of Petrarch, simply soar like somewhat unorganized fireworks. Each explosion more illuminating than the last.
160
Her white breasts pressed against a green tree-trunk
The orange of oranges as only oranges can
summon
One cat kissing another cat on a card in a card shop
in Clapham
Different from a blue tongue in the mouth or the hand
Of a Chinese doctor trembling just a little at the front of
the concept of reciprocity
Her yellow body as white as white paper really white
Two boxers standing silent in a ring perhaps hugging
Jack & Art What Spunk!
Light on wrought-iron in the dome of the mind of the
Dadaist Restauranteur
Whoever wishes to love nobly when she presses her green
something against a white what – friends –
There
Must
Always
Be
Doubt
...
Book Thug, the most adventurous small press in the country at the moment, is producing this new series, New British Poets, in runs of 100. Tim Atkin's Petrarch would be better served as a Gideon Bible type promotion, you know, one in every hotel room, maybe a run of 100,000. This isn't about religion, not remotely, but instead a new kick start to reason. "O, brave new world that such people in't!" This book in every hotel room would put things in a new perspective.
280
Sitting upright in front of a lie detector
& failing test after test
A male nurse called Pam says
Wake up Mr Atkins – it's time for your Phil Spector
There is the pot test and the one involving fire and domestic
dwellings
In order to discover any new planet
In the prose poem entitled "The Shrimp Exaggerated"
I am that tulip
In London SW19
The camera records everything but love
& on the other hand
Again – love –
If you can get it from my kung-fu grip
Only then you can have it
...
Atkins isn't really concerned about our fractured history or kaleidoscope future, he's riffing fantastic, about the present in poem after poem. I would be a liar if I said I got it all, some of it flies past me so fast I don't see it, but these poems resonate with me and call me back for more. Atkins makes me laugh.
312
No lovely small noisy birds with dark shiny feathers that
roam through empty pieces of clothing for a woman or
girl that hangs from the waist
No well-oiled water creature with a shell upon a tranquil
person who does sculpture
No place where old or injured horses are taken to be killed
and their flesh sold in low comfortable chairs with
supports for the arms through the part of a cheque ticket
etc which can be detached and kept as a record
No swift and frisky tall thin people in charming women
especially the women of a family or community
considered together
No recent tiny piece of atomic matter of long-awaited thin
sticks covered with a substance that burns slowly and
produces a sweet smell
No small piece of material sewn into a garment of a small
insect living on the bodies of people or animals in lofty
ornate state of being nearly unconscious or not fully
aware of what is happening
Nor there amid clear small young onions and red hats with
a flat top and tassel but no brim of green
Sweet device or system for finding objects under water of
the production of milk by women or female animals
virtuous and lovely
Nor other part of the human leg between the knee & the
hip can ever touch my number of things or mass of
material lying in an untidy pile
She buried it so deep with her own instrument for detecting
earthquakes
Who was along for my extreme views in politics or religion
a person employed at a beach or pool to rescue people
and a girl who is playful or cunning and does not show
the proper respect
So long and heavy is the pain of animals kept on a farm for
use or profit
That I call for the books giving information to investigate
and report on complaints made by citizens against public
authorities I should never have seen
...
We can't all be the sharpest tack or quickest wit which is exactly why we need voices like Tim Atkins to lubricate the wheels of the roller coaster. Reason isn't the reason for reading these exciting poems. It's the ride, an amusement park ride for the noggin.
366
The boys are singing to drive away the noxious birds
Before women it is useful to practice on statues
& now I am here to tell you all that I have discovered
That living is one of the best things – there where I ripped it
that her eyes couldn't have been more beautiful – I just
thought they were
Driving my utopian car over the dystopian roads
I go over and look at myself
& look surprised
Because living is one of the best things I go over
I stand there listening to the sunshine burning the grass
My horn a crumpled dream
Earthling! Comrades! Adios!
Work out your salvation with diligence
As if all things were still possible
...
If I didn't know that he were dead I would have thought Kurt Vonnegut might have had a hand in melding some of these poems. Tim Atkins Petrarch makes me anxiously excited to read more in Book Thug's New British Poet Series, and it certainly makes me want to read more of Atkins. In his world, it all seems possible.
Tim Atkins' Petrarch from Book Thug's New British Poets Series is edited by Stephen Collis and Amy De'Ath. If the quality of this read is any indication of what is to follow we are all in for a big treat. This chapbook pops and spits and crackles in your hands while you are trying to read it. If this is what they are doing in Britain then I want to see more of it.
253
to J.S.with L.
In England or Hobbiton & in denial of my age
now that summer has been sold off
Without dividend from whatever privatized public service
deigns to lease my leg to the national grid & then charge
for it
After 300 years of being Japanese
In the process of giving up wishing for the rewards
of a poetry written towards a ship made of bricks
Or of 'literal' fulfilment having been closer than
most hairdressers to both
In a taxi back from a fortnight's canapes & quality time
with chinchillas at a conference on Karl Marx
Let me state although it is late –
To be a poet is to hitch-hike 5000 miles in a kayak in order
to see
A jar in Tennessee Rioting Inna me khaki suit-an-t'ing
In Godalming
Selling out is the new
keeping it real Unhappy for 3/4 of a haircut
We always fall into the
Utopian Camp Poets
If you want to fix the world go to Wall St.
...
Tim Atkins is quite unlike anyone else I've encountered, the mix of styles, his range, his humour –
these poems, ostensibly a translation of Petrarch, simply soar like somewhat unorganized fireworks. Each explosion more illuminating than the last.
160
Her white breasts pressed against a green tree-trunk
The orange of oranges as only oranges can
summon
One cat kissing another cat on a card in a card shop
in Clapham
Different from a blue tongue in the mouth or the hand
Of a Chinese doctor trembling just a little at the front of
the concept of reciprocity
Her yellow body as white as white paper really white
Two boxers standing silent in a ring perhaps hugging
Jack & Art What Spunk!
Light on wrought-iron in the dome of the mind of the
Dadaist Restauranteur
Whoever wishes to love nobly when she presses her green
something against a white what – friends –
There
Must
Always
Be
Doubt
...
Book Thug, the most adventurous small press in the country at the moment, is producing this new series, New British Poets, in runs of 100. Tim Atkin's Petrarch would be better served as a Gideon Bible type promotion, you know, one in every hotel room, maybe a run of 100,000. This isn't about religion, not remotely, but instead a new kick start to reason. "O, brave new world that such people in't!" This book in every hotel room would put things in a new perspective.
280
Sitting upright in front of a lie detector
& failing test after test
A male nurse called Pam says
Wake up Mr Atkins – it's time for your Phil Spector
There is the pot test and the one involving fire and domestic
dwellings
In order to discover any new planet
In the prose poem entitled "The Shrimp Exaggerated"
I am that tulip
In London SW19
The camera records everything but love
& on the other hand
Again – love –
If you can get it from my kung-fu grip
Only then you can have it
...
Atkins isn't really concerned about our fractured history or kaleidoscope future, he's riffing fantastic, about the present in poem after poem. I would be a liar if I said I got it all, some of it flies past me so fast I don't see it, but these poems resonate with me and call me back for more. Atkins makes me laugh.
312
No lovely small noisy birds with dark shiny feathers that
roam through empty pieces of clothing for a woman or
girl that hangs from the waist
No well-oiled water creature with a shell upon a tranquil
person who does sculpture
No place where old or injured horses are taken to be killed
and their flesh sold in low comfortable chairs with
supports for the arms through the part of a cheque ticket
etc which can be detached and kept as a record
No swift and frisky tall thin people in charming women
especially the women of a family or community
considered together
No recent tiny piece of atomic matter of long-awaited thin
sticks covered with a substance that burns slowly and
produces a sweet smell
No small piece of material sewn into a garment of a small
insect living on the bodies of people or animals in lofty
ornate state of being nearly unconscious or not fully
aware of what is happening
Nor there amid clear small young onions and red hats with
a flat top and tassel but no brim of green
Sweet device or system for finding objects under water of
the production of milk by women or female animals
virtuous and lovely
Nor other part of the human leg between the knee & the
hip can ever touch my number of things or mass of
material lying in an untidy pile
She buried it so deep with her own instrument for detecting
earthquakes
Who was along for my extreme views in politics or religion
a person employed at a beach or pool to rescue people
and a girl who is playful or cunning and does not show
the proper respect
So long and heavy is the pain of animals kept on a farm for
use or profit
That I call for the books giving information to investigate
and report on complaints made by citizens against public
authorities I should never have seen
...
We can't all be the sharpest tack or quickest wit which is exactly why we need voices like Tim Atkins to lubricate the wheels of the roller coaster. Reason isn't the reason for reading these exciting poems. It's the ride, an amusement park ride for the noggin.
366
The boys are singing to drive away the noxious birds
Before women it is useful to practice on statues
& now I am here to tell you all that I have discovered
That living is one of the best things – there where I ripped it
that her eyes couldn't have been more beautiful – I just
thought they were
Driving my utopian car over the dystopian roads
I go over and look at myself
& look surprised
Because living is one of the best things I go over
I stand there listening to the sunshine burning the grass
My horn a crumpled dream
Earthling! Comrades! Adios!
Work out your salvation with diligence
As if all things were still possible
...
If I didn't know that he were dead I would have thought Kurt Vonnegut might have had a hand in melding some of these poems. Tim Atkins Petrarch makes me anxiously excited to read more in Book Thug's New British Poet Series, and it certainly makes me want to read more of Atkins. In his world, it all seems possible.
Tim Atkins talks about poetry in England.
www.bookthug.ca
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Living Under Plastic - Evelyn Lau
Today's book of poetry: Living Under Plastic. Evelyn Lau. Oolichan Books. Fernie, British Columbia. 2010.
I've had the pleasure of reading four of Evelyn Lau's previous collections of poetry, You Are Not Who You Claim (Porcepic Books, 1990), Oedipal Dreams (Coach House Press, 1992), In The House Of Slaves (Coach House Press, 1994) and 2012's A Grain of Rice (Oolichan Books). I wrote about A Grain of Rice earlier this year, in May, for this blog. Evelyn Lau has consistently hammered out books taut with emotional violence and vision.
Living Under Plastic is a collection full of lament for the dead, confessional poems of deep sorrow, touching tenderness.
Palliative Care Ward,
Lions' Gate Hospital
In the end you let go so easily
as if your life were a bit of dander
you shook from your sweater and watched sail
into the breeze. For weeks I sat by your hospital bed,
the ferries outside carrying their cargo of light
across the ink harbour as minute
by minute you sank down
towards your death. At first
you exclaimed at your penthouse view,
ashamed to accept such luxury
after a lifetime of self-denial––
the nurses laughed at you
for trying to slip them something extra
from your own pocket, for trying to make up
for the disgrace of having to handle
your humbled body. In those days you could still
pace the corridors while I tried not to watch you
shake at every stumbling step––
I would come to miss that time
when later there was nothing to do but watch.
The coil of catheter that carried away your urine,
the black orbs of your eyes fixed and unseeing,
your cracked mouth with its sweet stench.
It was then I reached for your hand
for the first time and you took it like a child
who needed help crossing the street. But you let go
of your life without a fight,
you who could argue the worth
of anything, who fussed over the price of a tip
in a restaurant, who bartered for hours
over some trinket in a street stall,
your high-pitched Cantonese complaint
enough to turn heads––
when it came to your own life you simply
went dumb. Some spirit flew out of you
so that you took the bad news
lying down, as if this was what you deserved,
as if death were a reward
like the retirement banquet and the gold timepiece
you worked your whole life to accept.
...
Living Under Plastic is divided into three loosely thematic sections. The first, Part One: Blindness, deals with family history and grief, the emotional mine field that we are all dragged through. These poems talk about the cost of loving and losing what we love, losing those closest to us.
Caffe Artigiano
This was my glamorous aunt, from whom a stray smile
or pat on the head was better than any treat––
eyelids painted like miniature skies, lily skin
now foxed, though a dot of gold glitter
winks from her cheek as she cries.
Gray dusts her hair but she doesn't care,
wears a patchwork coat like a cleaningwoman's,
misses a tooth, the gap like a tiny door onto darkness.
Behind her shoulder another woman is weeping
into her latte, mascara streaking her cheeks,
the man opposite her stone-faced.
So much sorrow on a Wednesday afternoon
in Caffe Artigiano. The wind lashing down the street
between the office towers, blur of blue.
A boat show at the marina, streams
of parrot-coloured flags snapping in the sea breeze,
strains of music, fairground pleasures
tucked around the corner, out of sight.
The day my aunt drove her husband to the hospital
and he passed through those gleaming glass doors,
she hurried off to plug the meter. The last thing
she said to him before his aorta burst,
flooding his body with blood––
I need to get change for the meter.
Why? she asks now,
why was that so important?
Coins for the meter!
She is as thin as a centipede, a girl
in a magazine, her pale face floating
above the stalk of her body––
refuses the treats from the bakery case,
the lemon muffin, the hunk of bread and chocolate.
Lifts a mug of black tea with both hands
like a child, like it's the weight of a stone.
It's like having a stone in my head, she says––
shivers when the door opens, winces
at the coffee grinder's roar.
I remember the men who courted her,
faces greasy with nerves and hope,
wide open with lust. My uncle
who was late for every appointment
had rushed ahead to meet an early death.
Outside, the lights wink on in the luxury stores––
they sail into view like cruise ships,
take your breath away in the gathering dark.
...
The second part of Living Under Plastic, Part Two: Tarantula, deals with the emotional toll of the death of love, the failure of love. Romance gone rancid. These poems are the angry/sad tale of woe of the spurned lover who now has to question their place, their purpose. Evelyn Lau doesn't flinch with these visceral, taut missives.
Part Three: The Drowning, deals with the loss of friendship, companionship, sincere loss that comes with the horrible realization of our own mortality that comes through the prism of lost friends. It all comes at a cost and Lau is fearless is sharing many of the emotions most of us keep secret.
The Heron Returns To False Creek
There he was, standing by the water.
Wearing his frayed, Chinese-silk dressing gown,
his beak the colour of copper
or hammered gold. Waiting all day
for the flash of a fish in the stunned water.
Imagine being blessed by faith––
to see this as a sign, a visit
from the afterlife. Your spirit reincarnated
into this patient fisherman,
standing like a mourner on the shore,
head bowed, robed in silence.
Above, the boiling white clouds
blown apart in the blue sky.
The vault of sunlight burning down.
You are no longer anywhere in this world.
...
Evelyn Lau is polished but never pristine. These poems work at a most primal level. Her family becomes your/our family and we are intimately interwoven into the lives Lau cares about. These fine poems are Lau in sharp form, crisp, but never abrupt. Evelyn Lau has become one of those poets who you can not not read.
www.oolichan.com
I've had the pleasure of reading four of Evelyn Lau's previous collections of poetry, You Are Not Who You Claim (Porcepic Books, 1990), Oedipal Dreams (Coach House Press, 1992), In The House Of Slaves (Coach House Press, 1994) and 2012's A Grain of Rice (Oolichan Books). I wrote about A Grain of Rice earlier this year, in May, for this blog. Evelyn Lau has consistently hammered out books taut with emotional violence and vision.
Living Under Plastic is a collection full of lament for the dead, confessional poems of deep sorrow, touching tenderness.
Palliative Care Ward,
Lions' Gate Hospital
In the end you let go so easily
as if your life were a bit of dander
you shook from your sweater and watched sail
into the breeze. For weeks I sat by your hospital bed,
the ferries outside carrying their cargo of light
across the ink harbour as minute
by minute you sank down
towards your death. At first
you exclaimed at your penthouse view,
ashamed to accept such luxury
after a lifetime of self-denial––
the nurses laughed at you
for trying to slip them something extra
from your own pocket, for trying to make up
for the disgrace of having to handle
your humbled body. In those days you could still
pace the corridors while I tried not to watch you
shake at every stumbling step––
I would come to miss that time
when later there was nothing to do but watch.
The coil of catheter that carried away your urine,
the black orbs of your eyes fixed and unseeing,
your cracked mouth with its sweet stench.
It was then I reached for your hand
for the first time and you took it like a child
who needed help crossing the street. But you let go
of your life without a fight,
you who could argue the worth
of anything, who fussed over the price of a tip
in a restaurant, who bartered for hours
over some trinket in a street stall,
your high-pitched Cantonese complaint
enough to turn heads––
when it came to your own life you simply
went dumb. Some spirit flew out of you
so that you took the bad news
lying down, as if this was what you deserved,
as if death were a reward
like the retirement banquet and the gold timepiece
you worked your whole life to accept.
...
Living Under Plastic is divided into three loosely thematic sections. The first, Part One: Blindness, deals with family history and grief, the emotional mine field that we are all dragged through. These poems talk about the cost of loving and losing what we love, losing those closest to us.
Caffe Artigiano
This was my glamorous aunt, from whom a stray smile
or pat on the head was better than any treat––
eyelids painted like miniature skies, lily skin
now foxed, though a dot of gold glitter
winks from her cheek as she cries.
Gray dusts her hair but she doesn't care,
wears a patchwork coat like a cleaningwoman's,
misses a tooth, the gap like a tiny door onto darkness.
Behind her shoulder another woman is weeping
into her latte, mascara streaking her cheeks,
the man opposite her stone-faced.
So much sorrow on a Wednesday afternoon
in Caffe Artigiano. The wind lashing down the street
between the office towers, blur of blue.
A boat show at the marina, streams
of parrot-coloured flags snapping in the sea breeze,
strains of music, fairground pleasures
tucked around the corner, out of sight.
The day my aunt drove her husband to the hospital
and he passed through those gleaming glass doors,
she hurried off to plug the meter. The last thing
she said to him before his aorta burst,
flooding his body with blood––
I need to get change for the meter.
Why? she asks now,
why was that so important?
Coins for the meter!
She is as thin as a centipede, a girl
in a magazine, her pale face floating
above the stalk of her body––
refuses the treats from the bakery case,
the lemon muffin, the hunk of bread and chocolate.
Lifts a mug of black tea with both hands
like a child, like it's the weight of a stone.
It's like having a stone in my head, she says––
shivers when the door opens, winces
at the coffee grinder's roar.
I remember the men who courted her,
faces greasy with nerves and hope,
wide open with lust. My uncle
who was late for every appointment
had rushed ahead to meet an early death.
Outside, the lights wink on in the luxury stores––
they sail into view like cruise ships,
take your breath away in the gathering dark.
...
The second part of Living Under Plastic, Part Two: Tarantula, deals with the emotional toll of the death of love, the failure of love. Romance gone rancid. These poems are the angry/sad tale of woe of the spurned lover who now has to question their place, their purpose. Evelyn Lau doesn't flinch with these visceral, taut missives.
Part Three: The Drowning, deals with the loss of friendship, companionship, sincere loss that comes with the horrible realization of our own mortality that comes through the prism of lost friends. It all comes at a cost and Lau is fearless is sharing many of the emotions most of us keep secret.
The Heron Returns To False Creek
There he was, standing by the water.
Wearing his frayed, Chinese-silk dressing gown,
his beak the colour of copper
or hammered gold. Waiting all day
for the flash of a fish in the stunned water.
Imagine being blessed by faith––
to see this as a sign, a visit
from the afterlife. Your spirit reincarnated
into this patient fisherman,
standing like a mourner on the shore,
head bowed, robed in silence.
Above, the boiling white clouds
blown apart in the blue sky.
The vault of sunlight burning down.
You are no longer anywhere in this world.
...
Evelyn Lau is polished but never pristine. These poems work at a most primal level. Her family becomes your/our family and we are intimately interwoven into the lives Lau cares about. These fine poems are Lau in sharp form, crisp, but never abrupt. Evelyn Lau has become one of those poets who you can not not read.
www.oolichan.com
Friday, October 4, 2013
We Are Not The Bereaved - Jesse Eckerlin
Today's book of poetry: We Are Not The Bereaved. Jesse Eckerlin. Frog Hollow Press. Victoria, British Columbia. 2012.
Over the past several days I've had the leisurely pleasure of reading, reading, and then reading some more. It has long been my habit to reread my favourite books whether they are novels or poems. This week John Irving's The Cider House Rules came around again. For me it remains one of the great novels of the 20th century and I enjoyed it more than ever. As I like to read multiple books, have several things on the go, also looked at Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace and now you don't have to. As much as I love much of Mr. Young's work – as a writer Mr. Young is a good musician.
I read another thirty or forty pages of Histories by Herodotus, it's been beside the bed for several weeks now and no matter how much I read I don't seem to be able to turn the pages very fast or get very far ahead... and as much as I enjoy it, I hardly understand a thing or retain much of what I do understand.
Megan K. Stack's Every Man In This Village Is A Liar is making for a very interesting follow up to Karina Dawson's Masham Means Evening. Of course Dawson is a poet and Stack is a journalist but they are both writing from very rare positions of privileged information about dark parts of the world the rest of us never see, about human experiences most of us never have to consider.
Read Austin Clarke's Where The Sun Shine's Best and dipped into Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker.
But the book I enjoyed the most was the Steampunk poetry of Jesse Eckerlin's We Are Not The Bereaved.
What They Inherited
toque on a maul handle on a canoe
braying candle lost somewhere leprous beyond
the slope and they sound distressed
wild strawberry patch its stunted bitter berries
twisted 'tween overgrown tire tracks
pile a' toxic trash by a rotting split-shake shed
rusty cans, kerosene, fabric softener & brood
toque on a maul handle on a canoe
Looking for tenants with an expired lease
The haggard rats that pray and feast
upon the bodies of the recently deceased
Tragedy is comedy for those who have
a short attention span
Comedy is tragedy for those who are born
with an impaired sense of humour
the will, they said, itself was skewed
that toque on a maul handle on a canoe
Looking for tenants on a month-to-month lease
The eager rats that pray and feast
upon the bones of the recently deceived
History is comedy for those who have
a short attention span
Lineage is tragedy for those who are born
with an impaired sense of humour
...
Eckerlin hasn't rediscovered the wheel, but he is a new voice with an utterly clear recast of modern traditions. Eckerlin has a vocabulary so splendidly robust and playful that his moments of harsh drama tend to sneak up on the reader.
For an Arctic Tern
In a pseudo tundra with errant pines
tossed about like so much salad––
in a yogurty landscape hemmed in
by the glare of a moon askew as
a defective hourglass––
I would set my 35 dollar
secondhand magnesium snowshoes
aflame
just to reassure your skittery
skip-a-beat-heart
that the Northern Lights
are indeed
real
...
Eckerlin has overtures that are almost operatic, finely detailed glances that snag your attention and an exciting tone that is constant throughout We Are Not The Bereaved.
This lovely book from Victoria's Frog Hollow Press was edited smartly by Shane Neilson, designed by Caryl Peters with cover and illustrations by Joshua Bastien. At 48 pages We Are Not The Bereaved is a chapbook, and a limited edition (100 copies), one as good as any other book I've read in a long time.
Jesse Eckerlin's excellent debut We Are Not The Bereaved delivers a great read, promises very good things to come.
What They Finally Discovered
To no longer want to grow into the shape of things to come.
The outflow of a borough's artery
diverted through your bedroom transom,
cholesterol levels intolerable.
Cafes & bistros frequented out of habit,
entryways buffeted by moral credulity,
inflamed throats clogged with beige stucco.
Imbibed & flirting, sharpshooting the shit,
we incensed a rat in calico, bungled over
a gum-rot border, then went our separate ways.
Renunciants emancipated upon the fault lines
of championing bumph we were decrying in private,
emaciated by all that tenuous dread sovereigon stuff––
wondering whether Captain Scavenge be fate or a favour.
What we finally discovered made monuments cringe,
bronze soldiers peel their eyelids like so many anonymous onions.
What nobody knows can't hurt 'em,
but that was the biggest misnomer of all:
continually mistaking the baby for blood
in the virgin shape of things to come.
...
www.froghollowpress.com
Over the past several days I've had the leisurely pleasure of reading, reading, and then reading some more. It has long been my habit to reread my favourite books whether they are novels or poems. This week John Irving's The Cider House Rules came around again. For me it remains one of the great novels of the 20th century and I enjoyed it more than ever. As I like to read multiple books, have several things on the go, also looked at Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace and now you don't have to. As much as I love much of Mr. Young's work – as a writer Mr. Young is a good musician.
I read another thirty or forty pages of Histories by Herodotus, it's been beside the bed for several weeks now and no matter how much I read I don't seem to be able to turn the pages very fast or get very far ahead... and as much as I enjoy it, I hardly understand a thing or retain much of what I do understand.
Megan K. Stack's Every Man In This Village Is A Liar is making for a very interesting follow up to Karina Dawson's Masham Means Evening. Of course Dawson is a poet and Stack is a journalist but they are both writing from very rare positions of privileged information about dark parts of the world the rest of us never see, about human experiences most of us never have to consider.
Read Austin Clarke's Where The Sun Shine's Best and dipped into Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker.
But the book I enjoyed the most was the Steampunk poetry of Jesse Eckerlin's We Are Not The Bereaved.
What They Inherited
toque on a maul handle on a canoe
braying candle lost somewhere leprous beyond
the slope and they sound distressed
wild strawberry patch its stunted bitter berries
twisted 'tween overgrown tire tracks
pile a' toxic trash by a rotting split-shake shed
rusty cans, kerosene, fabric softener & brood
toque on a maul handle on a canoe
Looking for tenants with an expired lease
The haggard rats that pray and feast
upon the bodies of the recently deceased
Tragedy is comedy for those who have
a short attention span
Comedy is tragedy for those who are born
with an impaired sense of humour
the will, they said, itself was skewed
that toque on a maul handle on a canoe
Looking for tenants on a month-to-month lease
The eager rats that pray and feast
upon the bones of the recently deceived
History is comedy for those who have
a short attention span
Lineage is tragedy for those who are born
with an impaired sense of humour
...
Eckerlin hasn't rediscovered the wheel, but he is a new voice with an utterly clear recast of modern traditions. Eckerlin has a vocabulary so splendidly robust and playful that his moments of harsh drama tend to sneak up on the reader.
For an Arctic Tern
In a pseudo tundra with errant pines
tossed about like so much salad––
in a yogurty landscape hemmed in
by the glare of a moon askew as
a defective hourglass––
I would set my 35 dollar
secondhand magnesium snowshoes
aflame
just to reassure your skittery
skip-a-beat-heart
that the Northern Lights
are indeed
real
...
Eckerlin has overtures that are almost operatic, finely detailed glances that snag your attention and an exciting tone that is constant throughout We Are Not The Bereaved.
This lovely book from Victoria's Frog Hollow Press was edited smartly by Shane Neilson, designed by Caryl Peters with cover and illustrations by Joshua Bastien. At 48 pages We Are Not The Bereaved is a chapbook, and a limited edition (100 copies), one as good as any other book I've read in a long time.
Jesse Eckerlin's excellent debut We Are Not The Bereaved delivers a great read, promises very good things to come.
What They Finally Discovered
To no longer want to grow into the shape of things to come.
The outflow of a borough's artery
diverted through your bedroom transom,
cholesterol levels intolerable.
Cafes & bistros frequented out of habit,
entryways buffeted by moral credulity,
inflamed throats clogged with beige stucco.
Imbibed & flirting, sharpshooting the shit,
we incensed a rat in calico, bungled over
a gum-rot border, then went our separate ways.
Renunciants emancipated upon the fault lines
of championing bumph we were decrying in private,
emaciated by all that tenuous dread sovereigon stuff––
wondering whether Captain Scavenge be fate or a favour.
What we finally discovered made monuments cringe,
bronze soldiers peel their eyelids like so many anonymous onions.
What nobody knows can't hurt 'em,
but that was the biggest misnomer of all:
continually mistaking the baby for blood
in the virgin shape of things to come.
...
www.froghollowpress.com
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