Lyrical language a musical marvel

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This article was published 26/10/2024 (636 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To read the poems in Angeline Schellenberg’s third collection, Mondegreen Riffs (At Bay Press, 160 pages, $25), is to fall head over heels into language that is at once playful and transformative. Schellenberg approaches colour, sound and questions on the internet to illuminate the workings of the speaker’s mind and its interface with the world.

“Somedays I mishear the most beautiful things. Hit me with your vista — spidery waaaaave, mondegreens: my muse,” she writes in Green. Schellenberg riffs fluently through pastoral images and cultural references. This poem encapsulates the collection both in the sense that makes her method clear, bringing together her language play as well as the religious themes around which she structures the collection: “Would you, could you, in this skin? Green is Ordinary Time: the path mortals walk between disturbance and glory.”

Hearing and mishearing thread through the collection, a source of pleasure and play, as well as a shadow. In How long can you keep a brain alive outside the body? Schellenberg rhetorically links music to violence, trauma and cultural judgment, as well as to identity. The speaker’s exploration of music is intertwined with variations on prohibitions against women’s sensual feelings and expressions. This sense of being alone, as well as the speaker’s alienation from herself, are conditionally resolved in language: “On my page// I give music pronouns: I, she, you. Translate sound into something I could love.”

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In her debut collection Cloud Missives (Tin House, 128 pages, $23), Haudenosaunee poet Kenzie Allen adopts an anthropological eye and an archaeological attentiveness to sift through the ongoing wreck colonization wreaks on contemporary Indigenous communities, and to find a way out of it.

The arc of the collection bends toward the hope healing and of liberation. In Love Song to Banish Another Love Song, Allen enacts this arc, beginning “One nail drives out another,” which leaves the speaker on “the sickbed, the all-body bruise,” needing “kindness.” The poem proceeds through the belief that “What I thought fit me/ only fit the outline of fear./ If I was unloveable, I became/ unlovable. If unworthy,/ I became that, too.”

There is a counterpoint, though, to that belief, which begins with a question the speaker asks herself: “Whose kindness did I need?”

The answer invokes nature as a resistance to the colonial foundations she has heretofore been confronting, ending the poem with [a]n apple, fallen right at my feet, a clear reference to the Biblical origin story.

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She Falls Again (Coach House Books, 120 pages, $24), a collection of narrative poems by award-winning Cree poet and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild, opens with a woman who thinks she might be going mad receiving a message from a crow: “pay attention,” the crow admonishes in the opening poem, “it’s about The Woman Who Falls From The Sky// [… .]// again// [… .] and she is pissed.”

In the poems that follow, Deerchild weaves stories of past and present generations of Indigenous women and myth to contend with the violence done to Indigenous women: “i am more likely to be assaulted/ abused ignored blamed shamed/ taken/ and/or killed// many times all at once/ this is a burden i will carry all my life.” The line break before and after “taken” serves to both emphasize the effects of violence and, in the context of “a burden the speaker will carry” throughout her life, insists that the mental load of witnessing and anticipating violence intensifies the speaker’s trauma.

The strength of the collection, beyond Deerchild’s incisive rendering of the effects of the centuries-long history of colonial violence, is the energy she brings to resisting it: “settlers can’t settle down/ this wild brown woman// my red dress is no redress/ this ragged dress// is this country’s flag,” she writes in she sings retribution.

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