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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Ironic, political collection calls for universal change

By: Jennifer Still

Posted: 06/28/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Pigeon (Anansi, 100 pages, $19), Torontonian Karen Solie's third collection, could be read as a homing device for the moral blind spots of North American self-involvement, or as a treatise on our pigeon-holed ecological state.

Instinctually ironic, intimately political, Pigeon is a call for universal change.

Stories of home, residence, high school reunions and ecological bewilderment challenge us to reach deep into our personal stores of hope: "Our separateness among / separate things is what unites us."

These are generous poems in a voice that is fearless and shy, open-ended and direct. Solie's poetic protractor is as tuned to the arc as it is to a pivotal point. In The World of Plants she writes: "Without our efforts, no tree is safe. / It's as if everybody always wants us to do something. / I'd like to see someone make us. Please, / someone, come on over here and make us."

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New Brunswick poet Anne Compton's third collection, Asking Questions Indoors and Out (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 79 pages, $15), is as enjoyable for its linguistic lushness as it is for its insights and inquiries.

With syntactical inventiveness, line after beautiful line, these lyrically exquisite wandering poems wade out into the metaphysic between-spaces of interior and exterior, words and wordlessness, past and future.

These are poems that break from the hold of narrative logic and burst forth with lyric intensity. Stanzas leap ghazal-like and amorously.

In The storm, the day you died, Compton writes: "Of all trees, the Butternut that drops its leaves all at once is nearest us: An hour's spill of yellow.....How does the tree know it's the right day?"

Compton's poems, as in Solie's, speak to our nomadic existences, the transience and connectedness of our fragile lives: "Our problems are related -- / cessation of breath, of belonging: We're all at the limit of tenancy."

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Calgarian Sharron Proulx-Turner's epic poem narrative She Walks for Days Inside a Thousand Eyes (Turnstone Press, 183 pages, $17.95) is an ambitious retelling of First Nations "two-spirit"/lesbian women's stories.

This is a book about healing divides -- political, racial and language-based. Splits in character, history, and animal/human relations are expressed through fluid, striking mythologies and lyrical anecdotes: "her eyes see what the sky sees / a house full of birds."

Proulx-Turner's trickster language, animal characters and anachronistic references add a playful wit. Most memorable is the nervous poet-crow who "kaks" away her woes.

Proulx-Turner's polyphonic approach, a multi-voiced infolding of story inside story, dream inside dream, addresses these issues, however the intensity slackens and loses momentum when the storytelling takes precedent over form and linguistic edge.

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Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House, 101 pages, $15), a selection of "verses, essays, confessions, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments and utopias" from 1995-2007, collected by Elisa Sampedrin, considers the painful multiplicity of artistic identity: "I needed to make a living / So provoked astonishment."

Robertson sings a linguistic bondage on the art of writing itself, an isolated and failing process where "any correction is arbitrary / monstrous."

Ideological hegemonies are met with imaginative verve. Conflicts of body and intellect, boredom and hunger, welt up in an ecstatic lyric that is incantatory, fragmented, meaningfully ornamental and always longing: "a word's a precious vase to sip from."

Unconventional in most every way, (beginning with the inclusion of the poet's name in the title, to the back cover title My Fidelity Is My Own Disaster), Magenta Soul Whip breaks linguistic bonds, resisting, improvising and reinventing a relationship with language and the world: "In this way, I am not / Restricted."

Jennifer Still, poet and co-publisher of JackPine Press, lives and writes in Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 28, 2009 B9

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