Long poems scrutinize collapse, destruction

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This article was published 29/07/2023 (1130 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alice Major’s latest collection, Knife on Snow (Turnstone, 107 pages, $18) draws on mythology, epics, Roman histories, geology and cosmology to consider the way stories of collapse and destruction are told, understood and preserved: “Our rare Earth is being written:/ metamorphic stone memory./ Sagas and skald-tales a faint sediment/ brushed on its surface, breath currency,” she writes in A fate for fire, a long poem in which she weaves mythology and the “boreal blazing/ to west and north, wildfires ignited” into an epic of climate change.

Major is at her most lyrical, expansive and incandescent in the collection’s long poems. “We’ve told so many tales/ of doomsday,” she writes, and this doomsday is more imminent and true: ” the reconing of Ragnarok arrives (… .)/ No wonder the young are shaking angry fists/ afraid the lid is coming down on us.”

For all her capacious understanding of political anger in relation to climate change, Major holds an equal measure of impatience with the expressions of political anger evident in other contemporary contexts: “I’m angry about anger,” she writes in Path integral, before she elaborates, “the braided lash that rounds us up into obedient legions to be hectored from lecterns: They’re taking things from you, those hidden elites, those threatening other-coloured others!”

This iteration of political anger is framed as a threat to collective well-being, a reactionary tantrum, which point Major emphasizes both with the vagueness of the fear expressed and in the other poems in the section, which consider anger rooted in childhood and adolescence in addition to these reactionary politics.

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In the three poems that make up her fourth book, Harrowings (Talonbooks, 120 pages, $20), Cecily Nicholson approaches the “complicated dreams” that arise from the intersection of Black intellectual and art histories with rural life. Nicholson skilfully assembles and weaves quotations from archival material, scholarly work and food justice organizations’ websites, as well as image descriptions into poems that extend engagement and invite an ever-deepening commitment to justice and liberation.

“Memoirs are always too soon/ and perhaps that means never,” she writes. In this book, Nicholson embeds the memoir into histories beginning with Frederick Douglass’s visit to Chatham, Ont.; Harrowings ranges across history and memory to present activism, tilling the space where food meets farm meets race meets colonial structures, reckoning with all these histories: “where have I been a settler is where I am/ restored returning to efforts of cultivation (… .)/ after-carceral/ end of days stitch together the sewn and sung drums reconstructed.

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From the moment “you pushed your foot against your mother/ wanting out” to the “smoke and mirrors we endure/ so we can reach wisdom,” Mary Barnes’ Moving Upstream (At Bay, 140 pages, $25) enacts a journey that aims to transcend comfort in favour of the integrity that comes from challenging oneself.

Barnes enables this challenge by the way the speakers in her poems respond to discomfort, either externally imposed — for example, in the racism the speaker faces — or internally generated. In an early poem, the speaker confronts the logic of her skepticism in the face of the Ojibwe language: “Wauwaushkeshi, she says/ and I wonder why my mother does not/ simply say, deer.” Her mother’s explantion, “He knows when to stop and face the hunter with fearless eye,” cuts through the speaker’s assumptions. The openness and outward equanimity with which the speaker meets this challenge holds space for the reader to unsettle their own comfortably-held assumptions.

Barnes intersperses poems rooted in the speaker’s everyday life with poems that reach beyond what we think of as the speaking subject’s boundaries. In When I was Yesterday, the speaker expands the boundaries of subjective being: “When I was yesterday/ the grass green and vibrant beneath my feet/ (… .) before the silver of winter covered my youth.”

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