Prose poems take root in the forest

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This article was published 24/09/2022 (1425 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Trees (At Bay Press, 64 pages, $25), which publishes Oct. 15, is the third collection of poetry in Lucy Hemphill’s Overhead series. These narrative prose poems, illustrated by Michael Joyal, examine the particular rootedness of the Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw nation, and combats the colonial displacements they are subject to.

Beginning with the speaker’s return home, the heavy disjunction between her memories of “vast green swaths of trees covering every piece of land” and the “great brown patches where the old growth has been completely cut down” that she sees from the plane disorient her.

The forest and the trees operate in different ways throughout the book. In addition to being themselves, the trees mediate the speaker’s experience: as a symbol of home, as an extended metaphor for the displacement of the Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw nation, as an emblem of hope for the future.

When the moment comes to name her child, there can be no better name than Ali’was, the Sitka spruce, which she notes earlier in the book “can be used in ceremonial cleansing to scrub away the heaviest, darkest, and most painful burdens. It’s also believed to cleanse away black magic.”

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Manahil Bandukwala’s debut collection, Monument (Brick Books, 96 pages, $22.95), looks to Mumtaz Mahal — called, in these poems, Arjumand, her birth name — the emperor’s wife in whose memory the Taj Mahal was built. These poems bridge past and present historical moments and, punctuated by drawings of the Taj Mahal gradually crumbling, interrogates the value and consequences of cultural monuments.

Inhabiting a historical figure, Bandukwala opens space for her afterlives: “When she would have been fifty-six there were so many/ ways/ she could have lived.” Her lyric imagination bridges past and present, attends to the moments left in the shadow by stories calicified in public monuments.

The poems in Monument are deeply searching — for truth, for justice, even as Bandukwala is clear that some harms cannot be redressed. She returns to the labourers who built the Taj Mahal, and whose hands were cut off after the monument was completed, and who have faded into the shadow of the public monument. “If love is a mausoleum tear it down/ brick by brick, uncut the hands// of twenty-thousand labourers.”

All forms of public monument, from buildings to poetry, are subject to deep examination by Bandukwala. Writing of Arjumand’s daughter, the way she is recorded to have been taken to her father’s bed as a substitute for her mother, she turns her eye on the poetry that causes this story to be passed down: “And who, in these lines, made your daughter the/ metaphor./ / Not poetry as in beautiful/ but poetry as in obscuration//as in unjust.”

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Ottawa writer Conyer Clayton’s second book, But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (Anvil Press, 90 pages, $18), approaches trauma and complex post-traumatic stress disorder via the surreal associativeness of dreams and the vivid images of childhood.

The intimacy that Clayton establishes in these poems is not, primarily, rooted in semantic or narrative content, but in the way she pushes every image and tests the limits of even the most ostensibly self-evident of logics, like the boundary between interior and exterior: “My body is sprinkled around the world — picnic blanket, towel, a shell in a jar on a desk, the bottom of a man-made lake, your hair, a fishie’s mouth, your mouth […] in a mirror, in a mirror, in a mirror, I gaze back at myself, lying thirsty in bed.”

A not insignificant trope running through these poems is body horror: “and he leaps onto my forearms, latches his mouth to my skin […] When I pull him off, my skin comes with him. A pale red tube connects us. He finally detatches after a good hard yank, and my skin slowly rejoins my body as I reconsider ownership.”

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Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.