Vivid verse

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This article was published 28/04/2023 (902 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

National Poetry Month is a yearly celebration of all things poetry. Every April since 1998, the League of Canadian Poets has assigned a theme that’s observed — sometimes as much in the breach as in the observance — to structure the celebration, and the theme for 2023 is joy.

The selection of books below, each by a local poet, might seem an idiosyncratic set given the theme and, while moments of uncomplicated bliss are rare in these collections, they evoke joy in their fierce intellect, linguistic dexterity, dark humour and expansive visions.

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“I did what scared me most/ and wasn’t wrong to fear it,” writes Kerry Ryan in Affirmations, the closing poem in her third collection, Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children (Frontenac House, 80 pages, $20). These are poems that examine motherhood, from its joys to its terrors, without assuming any of the common tropes are true.

Lyrically, Ryan’s poems are grounded in the everyday. For all that there are huge upheavals — the speaker’s daughter’s sudden and mysterious illness, the speaker’s father’s death, for example — these play out against a background of camping trips, car trips, neighbourhood cats.

Ryan renders the emotional sharpness of such ordinary moments with an exacting precision. In so doing, she makes the stories that go untold and unacknowledged both clearer and more strange: “Any mother will spill her badge of honour/ birth story — how many times she almost died —/ but no one tells you this waterslide is a throat/ closing in.”

Punctuating the collection are short, imagistic vignettes that describe individual features of the speaker’s daughter: “Pale roots comb/ tangled air,” reads Toes. The relation of these short pieces to the longer, more narrative poems sets the changing intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship into sharp relief: “But at seven, my daughter has begun to take on/ her own inscrutable form […]/ Shades drawn where I used to peer directly in.”

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In her debut Xanax Cowboy (Anansi, 120 pages, $19.99), Hannah Green adopts the titular persona to explore addiction and mental illness in a singular way.

Playing on the way suffering has been romanticized in writers and in cowboys, Green skewers this cultural demand for authenticity: “We want our artists to be wounds we can lick. To be frank we want some f—ing blood.”

This tension between the demand for authenticity, as well as the refusal of anything that doesn’t fit well-worn stereotypes as inauthentic, is central to the critique dramatized by Green in sections that focus on the workshop experience as well as those that consider the craft and reception of other texts. After describing a workshop in which “the wolves at the table want something authentic,” the speaker considers the case of James Frey’s first celebrated and then reviled debut novel, A Million Little Pieces: “We were willing to forgive the lazy writing, the swiss-cheese plot, because it was an account of substance-use disorder at its finest. The great authentic dogeared in paperback.”

Green torques a formidable stock of literary and cultural references — from Michael Ondaatje to Sylvia Plath, from Quentin Tarantino to various versions of Billy the Kid and beyond — to explore where and how life and story intersect and diverge: “How much easier to say/ she needs to know how Xanax Cowboy ends than to say when./ How much easier it is to talk about my book than my life.”

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In their debut Remedies for Chiron (Radiant, 104 pages, $20), m. patchwork monoceros invokes the astrological symbol of the wounded healer, charting a path toward healing from abuse and racial and medical trauma. The remedy they construct is community-focused, and it embraces and empowers those on the margins.

The speaker is conscious of the stories that circulate about people who are visibly suffering. In the poem Mad Black, monoceros seeks connection with their mother. Aware of both the “rumours./ Stories that my mother changed each full moon” and that the stories they’ve been told have been shaped and sanitized, the speaker nonetheless finds understanding in the connection: “[L]iving through that measure of suffering/ carries a cost./ Now, I hold her traumas in my body, her losses. Her loss.” This expansiveness of vision as well as monoceros’s effective use of near rhymes and rhythmic variations are present throughout the collection.

“You have been a witch all along,” they write in the closing poem — an acknowledgment that survival is multi-faceted and shifting. The lessons the speaker has learned will continue to inform them: “remember the times when rules […]/ dared dull your luminescence/ remember, with life-learned knowledge/you would still find your way through/the cracks of those boxes.”

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The Speaker in dennis cooley’s latest collection, body works (University of Calgary Press, 160 pages, $25) blurs the line between seriousness and irreverence in the way he inhabits his aging body, attending closely to the way it “rehearses a long list of grievances, sniffling/ & there are violins.”

Cooley’s lines enact the hitch between the idea of the body and the experience of it. For example, in quite the you he writes: “quite the me/ thod, the art/ hritic shoulders.” The way these line breaks interrupt the flow of the thought both highlights the art in these poems and the stiffness of which the speaker writes.

These poems move nimbly between linguistic and emotional registers and bring together seemingly incompatible sets of images, from the Pétomane to outer space: “five million years a stumble of stars/ hydrogen oxygen nitrogen carbon/ a flesh hold on life.” Even when the poems’ subjects are serious, cooley’s characteristically playful and flexible approach to language brings lightness to the collection.

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

Read this year’s Writes of Spring poetry selections in celebration of National Poetry Month.