Powerful imagery in formalist verse

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This article was published 28/08/2021 (1578 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Slate Petals (and Other Wordscapes), by Anthony Etherin (Penteract, 148 pages, $25), confirms Etherin as one of the world’s leading writers of constrained, formalist verse.

Etherin’s poems use complex, rigid structures — as a “simple” example, Etherin might create a sonnet where every line not only fulfils a strict syllable count and rhyme scheme but also reads the same backwards and forwards, letter by letter.

The poems are not only formally impressive but also display an advancement of Etherin’s ability to conjure powerful imagery and thematic force, something typically lacking in otherwise formally complicated poems like these.

“It’s rare to see so many crows / and now they’ve gone to gather night,” writes Etherin in one poem, while another wonders if the stars have named us in the manner that we’ve named them, “with names that last far longer than our own.”

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Susan Holbrook’s ink earl (Coach House, 134 pages, $22), moves the erasure poem (where an existing text is partially deleted to “reveal” another poem dormant inside) into its obvious endgame: rubbing away the ad copy for the classic Pink Pearl eraser.

The resulting poems range from irreverently mocking the jokiness of the whole project to thoughtfully pondering the nature of poetic creation and tradition. One poem advises, “erase your darlings” while another summarizes the history of art as “dudes n nudes.”

“Erase an eraser ad and sign it,” advises Holbrook in another poem. In doing so, Holbrook both makes fun of the project, positions it as an interruption of a male-dominated avant-garde art tradition and calls the reader to create.

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Ripping down half the trees, by Evan J (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 94 pages, $18), finds the former Manitoban (now living in Sioux Lookout) examining his own position in a troubling time for a troubled society, where racism seems rampant and class struggle claims new victims daily.

“The roar is the repute of Gimli, / is the rift from the old ways // from volcanoes to flatlanders / … / from Eddas to coffee // black like sheep’s blood. / … / Ammas / who call wealth a smoked goldeye.”

The poems perfectly capture the real sense of small-town life, which is something starker and more vicious than it is typically presented in the national literature (which often romanticizes the rural), but not without self-conscious humour.

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Phantompains, by Therese Estacion (Book*hug, 100 pages, $20), twines the horror of Filipino folktales into the autobiographical nightmare of suffering and surviving a rare infection that required extensive amputation. The poems thus position themselves as part of the process of purging dark emotions blooming out of the experience, even as they crystallize those fractured feelings into stone.

Considering the aswang, a flesh-eating creature able to dismember and reform itself, Estacion comes close to dissociating and empathizing with the necrotic bacterium that’s eaten into her, longing to reconstruct herself as “fangs & wings and… thousands of knives.” A startling debut with more honesty than most.

Jonathan Ball won a Manitoba Book Award for his short story collection The Lightning of Possible Storms (Book*hug, 2020). Visit him online at jonathanball.com.