POETRY: Patricia Young's poems rich in linguistic foreplay

ACCLAIMED Victoria poet Patricia Young opens her ninth collection, An Auto-Erotic History of Swings (Sono Nis Press, 110 pages, $15) with a poem that introduces the ancient lost erotic texts of Cadmus Milesius, thus beginning a poetic pilgrimage through the histories and prehistories, lived and imagined, of sexual encounter.

Young's poetic voice, rich in linguistic foreplay, has arrived ripe to its subject. These are poems that hum at the climax, flick the tongue at taboos.

The first half of the book takes its cues from 20th-century British sexologist Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Young's self-sufficient narratives map the sexual body in union and loneliness, from ecstasy to disappointment, desire to addiction, fertility to rape.

In Brass Eggs, desire is particularly lonely and exquisite: "tonight, lovesick yourself, you think/of those women rocking in rocking chairs, brass leaf balls / vibrating inside their bodies while outside beans climb trellises, / rain falls on rooftops, worlds tumble on."

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Quebec City singer-songwriter and poet Aurian Haller has arranged a lively specimen of poems in his second collection, Song of the Taxidermist (Goose Lane, 79 pages, $18).

As precise in image and form as they are raw in subject, Haller's poems are acts of preservation. Peering through delicate tissues -- bodies, memories, paintings, dwellings, language -- Haller performs a metaphoric taxidermy that animates the shared surfaces between the living and the dead. In Glove, Haller writes:

outside my window a rat grown

flatter and wider all week

under traffic -- to the point where it's

encompassing more of the road,

loses all semblance of rat.

He could be a glove missing

its match.

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Sault Ste. Marie poet Jena Schmitt draws from a collection of myth, paintings, writings and natural disasters in her ambitious debut, Catchment Area (Signature Editions, 91 pages, $15).

Questing for a subject that "cannot be mapped," Schmitt's poems are concerned with distances, lostness, the elusive displacements of memory and dreams: "when I try to scream/there is a dark hole where/my mouth should be."

There is an intensity to Schmitt's work that is persistent, driven. Her poems are filled with rupture -- walls ready to be pushed over, ground on the brink of fissure, light through glass shattering.

Running in one long, unbroken read between spare lyric and prose poem, Catchment Area traces absence with precision and openness, in the space between stars, shifting fault lines, changing meridians, folded-up paintings, shadows, upheavals and unfinished poems: "There is a period of stillness before and after a disaster, sometimes not felt at all. In a case like this, close your eyes. Imagine it."

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Victoria poet Dorothy Field continues brave personal explorations in her third collection, this time staying much closer to home, with poems on divorce and forgiveness.

In The Blackbird Must Be (Sono Nis Press, 85 pages, $15), Field negotiates betrayal and aloneness through poems written straight out of the heartwood ("gut, the tissue of exchange") of an old oak tree in the poet's backyard.

Field's mythical union with this tree transcends grief into expansiveness. Spirits gather in the oak's limbs and speak from exalted, powerful perches in the forms of deities, old friends, an estranged father, Greek prophets, crows, scars, strangers and the oak herself. What Field summons is beauty in the ability not to claim, but simply to find union, to love.

A remarkable tenderness and insight appear in Field's work as they have in the past, transforming loss into possibility: "And what will I do / with her space in the sky?"

Winnipegger Jennifer Still's second collection, Girlwood (Brick Books), has just been released.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 26, 2011 J9