Urgency permeates musings on the body

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This article was published 29/06/2024 (554 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The poems in andrea bennett’s second collection, the berry takes the shape of the bloom (Talonbooks, 80 pages, $19, published October 2023), carve out a space between belonging and its impossibility. The poems pulse with urgency arising from the tension between the line and the life to which it bears witness, between thought and experience.

“Each week,” bennett writes, “the embryo I’ve been carrying is/ likened to food: sesame seed, chickpea, kidney/ bean. Relatable, like the koan.” This poem, and many others in the collection, considers pregnancy and parenthood as a nonbinary person. “It’s not/ time to worry yet about how I’ll aske not to be/ called mom. First, madame has appointments,/ ultrasounds, preventative healthcare for the/ at-risk postpartum period, no energy left over/ to say I’m not her.”

The highly gendered social expectations of pregnancy externalize the disjunction between the speaker and belonging; however, the speaker’s internal monologue is similarly fraught. Consider the following, where bennett’s repetition of “my body” reinforces the semantic gulf between looking at and being in a body: “I’ll never/ be able to prioritize what it feels like to look at/ my body over what it feels like to be in my body./My body will never look like a man’s because I’ve internalized what men are supposed to do/ with their appetite: satiate it.”

The speaker’s conclusion complicates what it might mean to experience being in a body. Being is not, in this case, an experience unmediated by culture or thought.

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“All memory is water/ when you touch it it ripples/ when you try to hold it the words fall apart” writes Zehra Naqvi at the beginning of her propulsive debut The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose (McClelland & Stewart, 96 pages, $23). Memory, water and its lack link accounts of rupture and displacement from the distant past to the present.

The old stories Naqvi draws on — namely the myth of Philomela and the Islamic story of Hajar, the violence and displacement in them, as well as the voicelessness that haunts them — inflect the present and recent past with the resonanace of the mythic.

Late in the collection, the speaker’s grandmother tells her of the first three children she buries against the backdrop of a recitation of Hajar’s exile and the massacre in the desert. Using the present tense in relation to the deaths of children, while events of the distant past are being related, alters the valence of both stories: “The storyteller says Zainab, says Karbala. My daddammi takes out her handkerchief, places it on her eyes, that old story sweeps into her, her shoulders part, and she, like a river, pours and pours and pours.”

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In Absence of Wings (Caitlin Press, 144 pages, $20, published October 2023) Arleen Paré uses multiple points of view to bear witness to the life of A., the speaker’s adopted niece.

Paré rhetorically foregrounds the inherent limitations to witnessing someone else’s experience. Among the techniques she uses is the way the speaker observes herself: “fixing this fixing that fixing A. fixing her fixing me/ some days I can barely stomach my own solving self.”

Paré manages the speed and duration of time with a propulsive skill. At times, she stitches together moments separated by decades by invoking familiar narrative structures; at other times she returns to individual moments in A.’s life.

In particular, Paré turns to the date in 1985 when A. arrives to Ottawa with her new mother, adding contexts from documents about A.’s history to accounts of Canada’s residential schools: “when A. sat in the apple red car that snowy day in 1985/ tight against the car door/ hundreds of children sat in those residential school classrooms/ tight in their small wooden desks/ against their young wills.”

Beyond bearing witness to A.’s life and her death, to the space she left in the world, Absence of Wings is an indictment of the way we fail, both individually and as a society, the most vulnerable children.

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