POETRY: Subject, language meld into poetic voice

SHANE Neilson's Meniscus (Biblioasis, 93 pages, $18) is an example of that rare and defining moment in a poet's career when subject and language meld into authentic poetic voice.

Meniscus is the first full-length collection by Neilson, an Ontario physician, who takes on the confessional with precision and purpose.

Neilson doesn't hold anything back when he writes about what he knows best: the horrors of child abuse, the darkness of illness and the equally challenging states of love.

What is most compelling is Neilson's unsentimental range of emotion. An abusive father who taught his son "in the end there is fear" is also a farmer who, after losing $30,000 in one year, "lightly shovelled / shit onto sun-browned spots."

Every line is taut with pain and heart under Neilson's staunch eye. In For my father, he writes:

it is about being able to bear the load,

be it two cord of hardwood on a truck,

two cord in the ledger, the two cord of the heart,

two cord hauled out from backfields

and split with the hydraulic, carried in a child's arms

and piled head-high.

***

Another debut, this one by Torontonian Moez Surani, is Reticent Bodies (Wolsak and Wynn, 96 pages, $17, a clever yet reserved collection that considers the personal and political implications of silence.

Astute in form, the book peaks early with Sunday Morning (After the Gujarat Quake), a father-figure poem alive with discovery, uncertainty and rich metaphorical direction: "His is a dignity I believe to be sewn into his chin) / This man / who pins back blueprints / steps into them / identifying inefficiency / weakness of structure."

Most exciting is Surani's insight into the limits of the poem itself, what one is not able, or willing, to say within its structure: "How many times have I put off writing this / and even now as I begin / I know I'll tell only half-truths / of sunlight and not monsoon."

Here Surani reveals a remarkable vulnerability in the poet's tendency toward hope.

As accomplished as the writing is however, Reticent Bodies does not seem to fully get to where it is going and in the end feels as though it has backed away from, rather than faced, those "half-truths."

***

Winnipeg's Signature Editions has also launched two first books, Slide (79 pages, $15) by Ottawa Barbara Myers and Our Extraordinary Monsters (109 pages, $15) by Fredericton's Vanessa Moeller.

In Slide, Myers' discrete poems flip back and forth through years, topics and voices in an effort to locate an ever-present steady centre. In the title poem, one of the best in this collection, Myers considers the ageless aspects of self as though a slide show that is projected from within:

where's the grammar

for this -- this was you, wasn't it

still and dark when the imaging light goes out

sliding back into

your spine, your blood,

always the same age

Moeller's Monsters seeks connection through the form of lyrical correspondences.

In Schlucke Deine Stiche, Moeller weaves an elegiac bilingual correspondence between her German father (based on letters he wrote when he was 29) and herself, in English, responding at the same age: "I became the only one / who could translate you.../ Those last days / as your body became a thinning sentence / I became / your lexicon."

In love with meaning and mystery, Moeller asks, "How do I spend this currency of moments?"

This imaginative, curious, sensual collection is a fine and honest start.

Jennifer Still is a poet living in Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 26, 2009 H9