Climate, politics pondered in verse

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This article was published 27/05/2023 (1223 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The two long poems that make up ryan fitzpatrick’s Sunny Ways (Invisible Publishing, 104 pages, $22), Hibernia Mon Amour and Field Guide, sift through ordinary people’s everyday complicities in the climate crisis. From the title, which is taken from a speech given by Justin Trudeau, to his use of citation and mis-citation, fitzpatrick’s deft use of syntax and rhythm expose the glib emptiness and internal contradictions of political speech.

These poems circle the logics and structures of the Alberta oil industry and interrogate the ways in which the nation-state and those who publicly oppose the oil industry are complicit in the destruction it causes. “How do you live in the twenty-first century/you ask/ taking a sip of San Pellegrino/ through a straw you just banned/ because a straw is a kind of pipeline/ you can ban without letting go of something.”

While Field Guide is a propulsive rant, Hibernia Mon Amour is structured using a repeated semantic hesitation: “[N]o these protesters should better index their/ anger to the price per barrel but.” Through its repetition, the “no… but” creates its own momentum that overcomes the equivocation of the syntax to become increasingly breathless.

To write explicitly political poetry that resists pieties and platitudes and to explore responsibility for harm without giving over entirely to denial or becoming mired in shame is a difficult project, and fitzpatrick manages the challenge with dexterity and wit.

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In her debut collection, archipelago (Book*hug, 86 pages, $20), Laila Malik considers un-belonging as a way of being. In all your grandmothers have stopped cooking, the speaker notes the additional steps and considerations necessary to cook a shalgam in Canada: “we will not use mustard oil because it is banned/ in this country as well as unneighbourly,” she writes.

It’s not only the changes to traditional food that unsettle the speaker. Indeed, the poem begins, “this is how we know the world is ending.” The severing of tradition in evidence in this first poem iterates throughout, traced geographically and existentially along Malik’s long lyrical line.

In irreconciliation Malik rejects the political project of belonging, embodied by the co-option of reconciliation in favour of settler absolution. In this poem, the movements are structured on the repetition of the phrase “i knew a woman.” The portrait that emerges is a woman of the diaspora, cutting herself off from herself: “she didn’t know or she knew,/ her soles had grown spikes and with every step she impaled/survivors.” Nonetheless, this woman seeks absolution “forever incanting/ i can’t be a landthief if i live in the air/ can i.” The poem ends with the phrase “can i” repeated the width of a line, which blurs the distinction between question (can i) and affirmation (i can).

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The bulk of Sue Goyette’s long poem Monoculture (Gaspereau, 176 pages, $25) takes the form of the comments section of the official visitor’s website for Nova Scotia’s last grove of intact forest, which has been preserved as a tourist attraction. The varied responses in the comments cumulatively raise and leave unresolved an overarching question about the enterprise of conservation and of its role in enabling further environmental destruction.

“How exactly does this work? Is the forest a gathering space or is this like a mall? Can there be more signs?” From its baffled opening, the tone of the comments ranges from enraged to mournful, from enraptured to dismissive. The conversation that unfolds therein is punctuated by more lyric meditations, outside the conceit: “We had imagined the trees turning up like Banquo, at the end of department meetings, a haunting melancholy and surprise.// Because we had understood the royalty of their company too late.”

That we are too late — too late to effectively conserve the natural world, too late to safeguard the life of the most vulnerable — iterates throughout as deep grief and rage: “It’s an elegy not a forest,” reads one of the comments, “And this is the guestbook for the dead.”

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