Klassen’s poetic prowess compelling

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This article was published 24/08/2024 (728 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In his introduction to New & Selected Poems of Sarah Klassen (CMU Press, 232 pages, $20), Nathan Dueck arranges the poems by themes and motifs rather than publication history. This arrangement argues for the extraordinary breadth and depth of Klassen’s career, in excess to the strength of the individual poems and books. By highlighting the persistence of themes and motifs that occupy Klassen’s attention, Dueck showcases the subtle dynamism that results from sustained attention.

Klassen’s new poems are compelling, both for the way they pull both speaker and reader into the present world, with its glory and cares and failures, and for the way they, with equal intensity, invite contemplation. In Baffled, Klassen writes, “The world astir with beauty/ I cannot measure. Nor can I count the hordes of refugees/ at border crossings, nothing to eat, no water, nowhere to lay their heads,/ children kidnapped, abused, abandoned, cities flattened, riots/ at football games, another brutal murder in my neighbourhood.”

The speaker’s response to the way immeasurable beauty and injustice coexist but do not balance: “What is God thinking, breathing poetry into the prophet’s ear?” It’s a question that asks not only about what and how prophets speak, but also about what ordinary people see and choose (not) to say.

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In the introduction to Medium (Book*hug, 160 pages, $20), her latest collection of poems and vidas, Johanna Skibsrud imagines the voice as a “bridge between the known and the unknown, between subjective perspective and whatever the subject is not.” Skibsrud inhabits the voices of women from the ancient and mythological to the modern, exploring the oracular mode, where a subject’s voice both is and is not her own.

The vidas that accompany the poems are a play on a medieval form that dates from the troubadours and, in a collection of so many personnae, provide a welcome orientation. When, for example, Skibsrud writes of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna in Memory is a Blazing Thing, she uses the vida to introduce the doubt that the speaker is, in fact, that Anastasia.

The poem, rendered in two columns, plays on this question of identity. In the left-justified column, memory “doesn’t wish to/ preserve anything, but instead// to consume, even to/ extinguish itself.” In the centre-justified column, suggestions at memories and connections to the unknown past emerge. Here, the speaker seeks recognition from the memory of her uncle, asking “Does he see me/ coming?// Does he recognize/ me, now?”

In this poem, and throughout the collection, Skibsrud uses the relation between the vida and the accompanying poem to create inviting mysteries that propel the collection and emphasize the capaciousness of Skibsrud’s thought.

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Diane Seuss’s latest collection, Modern Poetry (Graywolf, 128 pages, $35), is a deep engagement with literary history, particularly insofar as it intersects with class and gender.

In My Education, she writes of coming from a working-class background and how it intersected with both school and writing: “your poems, with all of their/ deficiencies, products of lifelong observation/ and asymmetric knowledge, will be your own./ [… .]/ I have camped/ at this outpost my whole life.”

Seuss’s relation to literary history informs both a defence of poetry’s power and strength as well as a critique of the same. While in Poetry, Seuss dissects the Keatsian equation between truth and beauty, insisting on the value of bearing “witness/ without platitudes” to the “bedside of the dying/ world,” Seuss stakes a claim against the “stale orthodoxies.” Poetry, she asserts, “can even be valuable, though/ never wise.”

In Against Poetry, Seuss tackles the question of reality and metaphor, of uselessness and use. “Maybe to live within/ a poem is to entrap oneself/ in an architecture constructed upon/ outmoded theories of composition.”

Modern Poetry holds both these arguments about poetry, that it is valuable and that it is (or must be) useless, in tension — a tension that animates the collection.

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