Musical, physical nature of poems immersive

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This article was published 28/12/2024 (297 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With her latest book Chambersonic (Talonbooks, 176 pages, $22), Oana Avasilichioaei fuses text, image and sound, the latter of which is accessed by QR code, to expand the possibilities of the medium. Beginning with “A breath made with the whole body that stems from the deepest depths. A breath so abyssal, it surprises the vocalist with its existence,” she creates an immersive theatre.

In this oceanic theatre of language, image and sound, Avasilichioaei calls on a multiplicity of voices: “Fellow statements, fellow hungry mouths, fellow introverts, fellow inner voices, fellow dynamic duets, fellow quiet revolutions.” The list gathers momentum and grows in resonance, marked by a gradual dropping of the collective “fellow” and qualifying phrases until, in the final sequence, she calls on “Fellow mispronounced, mistreated, misunderstood, misengineered, misallocated, misinformed, misrepresented… Pronounce your part.”

The poems are accompanied by images and written scores, some of which place words on staves instead of notes. The most compelling is the graphic score, where drawn lines of varying intensity score the page horizontally and vertically. These images evoke the grooves of a record, but more pertinently, they evoke a physical experience of sound.

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In 10:10 (icehouse poetry, 108 pages, $22), his fifth book of poetry, Michael Trussler weaves poetry and photography, art criticism and correspondence, philosophy and travelogue into a timely and philosophically provocative reconning with humanity’s past and present.

Trussler turns again and again to the tension between human achievement — in art and philosophy but also in more ordinary ways — and human atrocity, namely the Holocaust and climate collapse. “So here’s a snapshot of our species: the way we educate our young, the 1940s, and we reach to discover more about the universe: tell me about the creature responsible for all these things.”

At issue is the relation of the past to the future. The poem Birds, Pity Nostradamus shifts halfway through, with the couplet, “Birds, pity Nostradamus, locked into the future, and/ forced to write its fierceness down,” whereby the continuity between the past, present and future is broken: “But the past is, the past is, the past is an enclosure,/ a change room only few of us have seen.”

This image of the past as disconnected from the human present and future haunts and provokes Trussler’s poems and prose.

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Renée M. Sgroi’s latest collection of poetry, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding (Guernica, 121 pages, $22), is an expansive experiment in understanding the human and non-human world, empathy and bearing witness, loss and language.

As the title might indicate, the garden’s leaves and foliage brush up against books and their pages. In Mixed-Method Experimental Study of Acer Saccharum In Situ, with Prognosis by Arborists and Linguists on the Future of Interspecies Communication: An Investigation, Sgroi uses the form of a report on a scientific experiment to explore this connection.

Beginning with “the unanticipated discovery of a fragment of speech,” she runs through a speculative experiment to enable more systemic communication, resulting in, among other findings, “the song of a dying leaf: // x o ox y s s // y ox s i i // x o. o.” This choice, to render the leaf’s song recognizably but illegibly, acknowledges the that a leaf might have something to say at the same time as it implies that humans are not necessarily intended to understand the specifics of that speech.

Sgroi makes other experiments toward interspecies communication by inviting in the voices of her garden, from earth and rain to vegetables growing to animal visitors. In Danaus Plexippus, for example, Sgroi imagines what a monarch might say of its life, place, lineage, and in so doing contextualizes the themes of loss and grief which run through the collection: “of course, we break along the way// along the way I left my children somewhere/ […] I can’t remember/ where.”

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