Love poems written in Romantic tradition

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This article was published 24/02/2024 (945 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ali Blythe’s Stedfast (Icehouse, 48 pages, $20) is a book-length response to John Keats’ Last Sonnet. These moving love poems write into the Romantic tradition, making and re-making it for the modern world.

Taking place over the course of a single night, Blythe’s poems enact the distance a questing spirit can travel outside and inside themselves: “Be outside your human// smallness, the stars/ want to tell us.// But the night just pours/ with the same old stories.// My little who-did-what-/ to-whom memorial.”

Here, the limitations — of a night, of story, of self and more besides — and the friction the speaker encounters when he brushes up against them, are part of the subject of writing love poems.

Among the collection’s many strengths is the way the poems hold transformation and the eternal in constant balance. Blythe opens Its Soft Swell and Fall with an image of each day a key “microscopically changed” from the one before “so the door that flings open/ is never the same door at all.” Amid this change, though, the speaker proclaims “If I must believe in something/ I choose eternal recognition,” before he returns to the “to the infamous hotel// With its long hallway/ of choosing you.”

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In Elementary Particles (Brick, 80 pages, $23), Sneha Madhavan-Reese writes about the world in its infinitesimal details in such a way that each particle reverberates with enormity and wonder. “If I could convey in words the splendour of such small things,” she writes, “I would not be afraid of living such a short time.”

From the title poem which opens the collection, wherein “the atoms of my fingertips, your hair, this chair:/ quarks, antiquarks, and gluons wink// in and out of bing. Our bodies are built of ephemera,” Madhavan-Reese sets up an intricate web of scientific and mathematical language woven with family stories. So too, with its emphasis on ephemerality, the poem establishes a frame for the forthcoming death of the speaker’s father.

Where early in the book, “Words make wizards/ of us all,” in this last movement, after the speaker’s father dies, words make connections between the living and the dead. In I think of Dad While Buying a Sandwich, Madhavan-Reese writes, “If Dad were here, he’d be asking for a BLT./ There are things that sound better to me than BLT,/ but Dad will be here if I order a BLT.”

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Pascal’s Fire (Biblioasis, 64 pages, $20), Kristina Bresnen’s propulsive debut, is a long poem that spans the Book of Exodus to the present day. At every moment, it seems certain that Bresnen has tried to do too much, and yet she assuredly holds thousands of years and dozens of philosophical threads in precise tension. Blending the narrative long poem and philosophy, Bresnen genuinely recons with grief and faith.

The long poem opens with Hestia, a burn victim, on her deathbed, as the speaker bears witness, awash with grief. This scene is interwoven with reflections on Moses, Hestia’s favourite Biblical figure “because he doubted, both his own words and the possibility of God’s words.”

The vision that prompted Blaise Pascal’s religious conversion, too, structures the text. Bresnen recounts its effects: “He forgets his learning.” This moment is echoed in the present moment of Hestia’s bedside: “I’ll never see what Pascal saw. I see Hestia in her hospital bed [… .] I forget all my learning.”

Pascal’s Fire follows the hesitation of the tongue, its “ship’s rudder” navigates the moments in the face of which speech is insufficient, namely grief and faith: “I would like to have here with me a mouthpiece through/ whom my words and prayers might be interpreted/ because I do not know what to speak or what to pray for/ or how or why, though there exists inside me a groaning I/ can’t articulate.”

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Melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.