Trauma, histories rooted in verse

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This article was published 26/08/2023 (1123 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With Selvage (Invisible Publishing, 90 pages, $23), Kate Siklosi attends to the unfinished edges of intergenerational family trauma, of bodies, of histories, of the colonial state, of nature. Beginning with the frayed edge of a family story, Siklosi proceeds to weave language and visual poems, stitching and words and nature’s leavings, historical document and ecology: “when my dad’s mother left the world her family scattered like shadows at dawn. the fates cut their threads, littered them on strange doorsteps. there were secrets, death, survival. language spoke in edges, cuts.”

Siklosi’s interventions in the text of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms locate her family’s immigrant traumas in the context of the ongoing harm to Indigenous people and to the environment perpetuated by settler-colonial assumptions on which the document relies.

“the land tesstifies/ guilty witness/ [… .]/ notwithstanding/ matters/ continued/ citizens made/ secondary to proceedings,” she writes on the left side of a bifurcated page. These lines are accompanied by an evocation of “mycelium thread/ knotted strongholds/ migratory fingers/ in the ground/ enduring” on the right of the page.

Networks of roots and mycelia ground the collection and bridge into the future. This attention, marked in the book by the speaker’s progressing pregnancy, adds urgency to Siklosi’s commitment to sifting through earth, country, language and family.

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The poems in the first half of Song & Dread (Talonbooks, 99 pages, $19), Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s third full-length collection, bear witness to the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic: “after this/ there won’t be comfort in not knowing,” she writes in pi day 1.

While these poems acknowledge the free-floating anxieties and the isolation of lockdowns, the speaker’s attention refuses to be distracted from the uneven distribution of the pandemic’s weight onto “those who do the work we rather don’t/ those for whom a $2 raise is sufficient hazard pay/[… .]/ those who allow us to stay home stay safe stay away/ from this thing.” The accumulated litany of this witness insists we acknowledge that these workers who bear most of the risk of illness and death are overwhelmingly Black and others who are marginalized.

While the poems in the second half of the collection are not rooted in the pandemic, Okot Bitek continues this theme of bearing witness to the complexity of Black lives, specifically “we of the margins.” These poems are dynamic, animated by the rhythms of religious observances and social and bodily intimacies. In but today we wake up the speaker observes, “funny that both of us/ have lost all evidence of youth.” The lessons the speaker draws from the bodily experience of aging is that “now we have more space for grief/ & now we know each other/ as containments for much more.”

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Gary Barwin and Lillian Necakov’s collaborative long poem Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses Eye (Guernica, 163 pages, $20) begins with that headline from 1910 and proceeds to range across “the galaxy of the cephalopod’s fold// forgetting/ […]/ war of the eyes/ the planets and churches/ the cigars of his sophmoric youth.”

Using everything from language to mathematical equations to visual poems, the conversation between Barwin and Necakov is a revelatory romp through a kind of transformation poetry enables. Where near the start of the poem, “St. Augustine says/ we should not start at the beginning/ nor the end/ but where we are, in the middle,” the poem reiterates these themes until “to begin and begin and begin/ in the middle of a sentence/ after the final yes/ of yesness.”

From the absurdity of its beginning, the poem, while never losing sight of humour and playfulness, moves through the more serious terrain of grief, memory, climate change: “I/ remember// would/ wound// wound/ sound// sound/ found// found/ song.” Ultimately this poem centres the importance of creativity, connection, conversation and play in the way we encounter the world.

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.