Conditions restraining poets’ work pondered

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This article was published 23/09/2023 (1051 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Erín Moure brings her inimitable style of lateral thinking to her latest genre-straddling book, Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (House of Anansi, 176 pages, $23). In this poem-essay, Moure follows breath(lessness) through the work of Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop and Angelina Weld Grimké and into the present conditions of her own writing.

It’s impossible to ignore the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the way it shapes Moure’s relation to her own breath and thinking. “In the time of Covid,” she writes when she compares Grimké’s rhymes to Bishop’s, “I think we can understand rhyme as a suture between the reflected physical body and celestial form.” Thus shoes, both drawings thereof and references thereto, step intermittently through the book, as though to try to make something of loss.

Breath and voice, shoes and migrations, poets’ deaths and mothers weave through Theophylline. From Rukeyser’s poetic voice which “rhetoricizes […] on behalf of all (unexamined)” to the way Grimké’s is “a voice curtailed,” Moure considers the conditions (race, gender, sexuality, disability) that constrain writing and its reception.

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Disguise and translation play off one another in Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s second collection, Entre Rive and Shore (icehouse poetry, 102 pages, $20). Bernier-Cormier focuses on his ancestor, Pierrot Cormier, who narrowly escaped deportation in 1755 by wearing a dress to escape the prison in which he was held: “Les gardes brandissent/ leurs apostrophes de feu mais n’entend que/ skirt, skirt. Un pas de pierre, un pas de pierre,/ une porte bégaye et il jaillit du Fort.”

Throughout the collection, Bernier-Cormier returns to this initial poem to translate it and transform it. In accompanying “Notes on translation,” he explains these choices and elaborates a theory of translation. For example, in the poem from which the above quotation was taken, the only English is “skirt, skirt,” which stands for the swish of Pierrot’s steps as he walks away from the fort. In his English translation “jupe, jupe” preserves the onomatopoeia and “the clandestine aspect of the phrase, the sense of one language infiltrating another.”

A key theme that emerges is the connection of translation to the displacement of the Acadians and to the displacement of Indigenous people the Acadians had themselves imposed. Thus, for all that the speaker experiences bilingualism as “a rift” within himself, he ultimately refuses “to believe qu’une frontière armée découpe each bilingual self, je refuse d’être un garde at the borders of language.”

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The natural world intersects speculatively with human institutions and storytelling structures in Meghan Kemp-Gee’s The Animal in the Room (Coach House, 80 pages, $24).

The result is a taut collection that pulls language to the edge of logic: “If you’re hungry for wisdom, write your proverbs in dead languages;/ they’re dangerous in living mouths,” she writes in The Giant Pacific Octopus.

The Animal in the Room is a collection that refuses the familiar comfort of stories and, by extension, of the human-centred world. Kemp-Gee uses the structure of fairy tales to amplify the strangeness and tensions in the collection. Multiples of three, witches in the woods and the uncanny intersection of recognizable world and the supernatural one are all familiar tropes from which Kemp-Gee derives unfamiliar meanings. In Her Daughter, she invokes the witch’s daughter, who speaks to the lure of her mother’s stories, even as she refuses to be subject to them: “There’s not a name for my place in the clearing. There’s no story/ for your stormed-in fevered viciousness.”

Moure, Bernier-Cormier and Kemp-Gee are among many poets featured in online and in-person events through to Oct. 18 at Thin Air 2023: Winnipeg International Writers Festival. Additionally, Kerry Ryan and Conor Kerr will be featured in afternoon book chats, while Margarita Sauna, Amber O’Reilly and mimi tempestt will be giving online workshops as part of the Writing Craft series. For more visit thinairfestival.ca.

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