Assonance accentuates reflections on nature

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This article was published 27/07/2024 (500 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“THE feet trudge the path of the eyes” in Sylvia Legris’ breathtaking collection, The Principle of Rapid Peering (New Directions, 96 pages, $26), which takes its title from Joseph Grinnell’s description of the feeding behaviour of some birds.

Legris makes this observation — that birds are in a constant state of rapid peering rather than passively waiting for food — as the collection’s organizing principle, which she expresses with a delicate use of sound to alter the reader’s focus within a scene or moment. In the second part of the title poem, for example, she ends a stanza with the following repetition: “duckweed waterweed bur-reed/ duckweed waterweed bur-reed.” This repetition enhances the pleasure of the assonance and also shifts an impressionistic moment — one where the speaker’s attention has moved granularly over a number sights and sounds — into vivid focus.

In this poetic reconsideration of the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Legris bring her full attention and curiosity to the matter of the everyday. She renders the birds, animals and plants that populate her walks, revealing the movement that underlies the appearance of stillness: “Prayers blow by like the guarantee of rain that never came./ Prayers like low-layered clouds, a high-haze horizon/ of upstroke and downstroke, an unnerving of wings./ Meanwhile the river follows the folly/ of what the eye can’t see can’t hurt.”

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In her arresting debut, The Seventh Town of Ghosts (McClelland & Stewart, 105 pages, $23), Faith Arkorful knits the ephemeral worlds of pasts, dreams and myth to present, concrete worlds. “Death digs its way into every vacation/ and in this homecoming/ I grow larger. Canada, my body, a frozen lake./ [… .]/ Let’s throw salt on old and new, all the ghosts/ pretend/ call for sun and water/ love beyond all interruption.”

In Origin Story, with which she opens the collection, Arkorful moves through the liminal spaces between self and other, between imagination and reality, between story and myth. “i am going to tell you about yourself, she says/ which means she is going to tell me what she knows of/ a beginning for herself. my mother sings to me in words/ saved for worship.”

The family connections and love of self and community that Arkorful establishes in the spaces between times and modes of storytelling are a necessary bulwark against violent national mytholgies and the way those are used to harm marginalized communities.

In Hyenas, she confronts these harms directly — first by riffing on the various linguistic uses of “police,” but then following the rhythm of the litany into the realm of the imagination toward a reparative possibility: “The alpine swift can go months without touching the ground. To police: I will come home alive and stay that way [… .] To allow a bullet to melt.”

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In That Audible Slippage (University of Alberta Press, 104 pages, $20), Margaret Christakos attends to the moment when “you are only partially/ languaged at least half of your brain/ ribbets & growls sentences/ of minced emotion.”

Christakos invokes the cliché of mixed emotion as though it’s a half-remembered phrase, then slips immediately into something simultaneously more raw and more restrained. She places the line breaks to emphasize the passages’s semantic ambiguity, which in turn invites the reader into the slip between language and sound.

At the end of this opening poem, Christakos evokes yet another slip, between nature and institution. “You cough into the drive-in order box/ Black tea with milk two// sugars. Young squirrel hands over// a paper sac for all your valuables Sky blue/ gown flaps open at the back as// if you’re a window.”

Christakos uses sound, the slip of the tongue into and out of liminal states in order to bear witness to snowy walks, environmental degredation, corporate impunity: “sit/ & listen to it — thirst for air —/ then fashion a response/ to an unintelligible question — proceed weeping.”

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