Letters of the Alphabet Go To War

 

Letters of the Alphabet Go to War / Lesyk Panasiuk
trans. from the Ukrainian by Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky
Louisville, KY: Sarabande, c2026.
32 p.

I can't say too much about this forthcoming poetry collection here, as I have already reviewed it at Library Journal. But I wanted to share it so that others can hear about it, as it was a top read for me. 

It was haunting and powerful. It's a small book, almost a chapbook, published by Sarabande, but I was pleased to find something by a Ukrainian author who I didn't know yet. The poems are so personal and investigate language, poetry, literature, culture, all in the face of a violent war. 

I really loved it. I thought the approach was unique, and the poems themselves are accessible to a Western audience. Intelligent, emotional, and beautifully done. The translation is much appreciated as well. Search it out once it's published, you will be richly rewarded.

Apricots of Donbas

 

Apricots of Donbas / Lyuba Yakimchuk
trans. from the Ukrainian by
Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky & Svetlana Lavochkina
Scio, OR: Lost Horse Press, 2021, c2015.
166 p.

I'm starting off my Women in Translation month with some unusual (for me) books. I generally read a lot of novels, so I'm branching out a little to include some poetry today.

I'm not sure how to talk about poetry, so will just say that I found this collection moving and interesting. Yakimchuk is writing about the experience of the 2014 Russian invasion of Donbas, where she and her family had lived for generations.

She creates imagery of her past and of the current situation of bombs and invaders, of fleeing and remembering her home, with evocative mentions of the apricots of the region as a symbol. 

She plays with language, breaking it up into its parts (and I have to recognize the skill of the translators here, able to render this into English with the intention of the original coming through). The poems are not opaque, they are readable and understandable, even while they manipulate language to express the intent of a poem. I had to read slowly, and reread a couple, but I found this a cohesive and meaningful collection. I have read a few of Yakimchuk's poems in other collections, like Words for War or The Frontier, so it was nice to have her work gathered together this way to really experience it fully.

If you're interested in women's voices responding to war, and want to encounter a popular Ukrainian poet, I recommend this strong collection. 

Voices of Freedom

 

Voices of Freedom: Contemporary Writing from Ukraine
ed. by Kateryna Kazimirova & Daryna Anastasieva
Winston-Salem, NC: 8th & Atlas Publishing, c2022.
314 p.

This is another collection of varied writing from Ukraine, published 6 months after the invasion of the country, raising money for humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. It was a joint effort between 8th & Atlas Publishing and Ukraine based Craft Magazine, and highlights some of the best Ukrainian writing of the past 50 years.

It contains excerpts from 27 writers, with a slight majority of male writers represented. The pieces are essays, poems, and short stories, and as the publisher puts it, "this collection demonstrates that the desire for freedom and the struggle to achieve it is a theme that cuts across generations of Ukrainian writers, and is a central preoccupation of Ukrainian society."

I think that the collection meets this goal quite effectively. No matter whether a writer is talking about an earlier Revolution or conflict, or directly referencing the current war, the words are illuminating, powerful, and full of current meaning. I appreciated that there was a small bio of each writer prior to their work, giving some info on them and context as to their place in Ukrainian literature. There was also info given on each translator, which was another nice element, as these translators are doing a huge job sharing work into other languages - there are many names I've seen elsewhere with other newly translated work. 

There is a wide range of voices here, showing off different styles, topics and literary schools. It's a great way to become more familiar not only with new young writers but some of the older ones who've been writing throughout past years of Soviet rule and the struggles of a newly independent country. It includes some of my favourites, like Oksana Zabuzhko and Lyuba Yakimchuk, as well as some names I hadn't read before. 

Another fabulous collection to look out for if you are interested in expanding your knowledge of the writers working in Ukraine now. Their many perspectives on the past and present will also expand your understanding of the reasons behind and effects of the current war.

You can get a taste of the book by watching the book trailer, which includes 4 of the poems from the book, on YouTube: 

Words for War

Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine /
ed. by Oksana Maksymschuk & Max Rosochinsky
Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institue, Harvard U., c2017.
240 p.

This is a collection of poetry by 16 varied Ukrainian authors, with a nice mix of women and men represented. There are modernists, more traditional writers, new and young ones alongside more established names. It's a great collection. You can view Words for War and read pretty much all of it online; the site has much the same cool design feel of the book too. 

There is a comprehensive intro and afterword, as well as author and translator bios in the back. There are also notes on the places and events mentioned in the poems which North American readers might not be familiar with. This certainly adds to the understanding of the poems, and was appreciated. 

This was published in 2017, so it has many poems written shortly after the hybrid war started in 2014 when Russia invaded the east of Ukraine (the Donbas area) and annexed Crimea. Everything was clear then and yet it took a lot more for the world to pay attention. These poems are beautiful, harrowing, ironic, sad, blunt, angry, powerful, and much more. Anyone interested in the literature of Ukraine needs to become familiar with the poets, they are a strong element of the writing that shapes the culture. This is a good way to become familiar with a lot of names in a short time, and get a feel for those that resonate with you. For example, after reading Lyuba Yakimchuk's work in this collection, I requested her full collection Apricots of Donbas from my library system. Collections like this one a great way to expand outward. 

This book is also very nicely produced. The font is clear and readable and the image of each author at the beginning of their section is a artistically altered photo -- it's very appealing. I found it really well done and a must read for anyone new to Ukrainian poetry. 
 

The Poetry Remedy

 

The Poetry Remedy / William Sieghart
NY: Viking, c2019.
224 p.

Another choice for poetry month reading! I was intrigued when I saw this book, as it's a form of bibliotherapy, which I have always found engaging. So I had to pick up this collection and check out what the author was prescribing, and for what conditions of life. 

Overall, I liked this a lot. I feel like this is a great concept, and a good introduction to poetry for those who might not often consider it as an option.

Caveats were that the descriptions of a condition were sometimes longer than the poetry itself, and that poetry was sometimes just an excerpt. I'd like to have had a few poems for each suggestion, rather than just one, and would have liked a wider variety of author. The poems are lovely and mostly accessible, but they are traditional and by standard canon authors for the most part. I wasn't convinced by the connection in a couple of cases, but for the majority of the book I did find it helpful and some of them really worked for me. 

Poetry really works for this purpose; Sieghart ties them to life conditions like anxiety (read The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry), existential crisis (Primary Wonder by Denise Levertov), regret (The Ideal by James Fenton), insecurity (Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou) and much, much more. 

What I came away from through reading this book was the sense that poetry makes great bibliotherapy. And it would be a fantastic idea to create your own index of poems that speak to the way you're feeling, as you come across poems that touch you. Then you could flip through your personalized collection anytime, according to your own categories of life experiences and helpful words. 

This book inspires thoughts like this, and introduces you to many new poems. Check out your library this month to see if you can explore more of it too! 

Thread Me A Button for Poetry Month

 

Thread Me a Button / Jude Aquilina & Joan Fenney
Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, c2012.
73 p.

It's poetry month! So I thought I might share a little bit of poetry today. I discovered this book of poetry in a library collection online, and the adorable cover and title drew me in. It really is a collection of poems all centred on buttons! It's written by two Australian women, and it's surprising how much they can wring from a button. 

The book is set up in 6 sections, each with an average of 9 poems, ranging from haiku length to full page poems. There are some that are straightforward, some quite funny, and a few that are more serious and moving. 

There is a poem about a woman who lost her lover in the war, and for the rest of her life she wore one of his buttons stitched to a petticoat. There are some celebrating beauty, or relationships. In the section "In the Sewing Drawer" I found some of my favourite pieces, lots about the act of sewing. And this section includes what I think was the most memorable poem, for me, called "In the Light"; it's about the closing down of Mrs. Pearl Morris' haberdashery shop, and I found it evocative and bittersweet. 

This was a chance find, and a gem. I enjoyed reading through this accessible collection, which will appeal to anyone fond of buttons as part of sewing history, memorabilia or domesticity. Easy to read a few of these each night before bed to relax and enjoy some whimsical poems! 

(this review first appeared in slightly different format at Following The Thread)

The Frontier: 28 Contemporary Ukrainian Poets

The Frontier: 28 Contemporary Ukrainian Poets
ed. & trans. from the Ukrainian by Anatoly Kudryavitsky
London: Glagoslav, c2017.
416 p.

This collection is a great introduction to some of the newer names in Ukrainian poetry, as well as a couple of slightly more established ones. There is good mix of women and men, from different areas of the country. 

The poems here are fairly modernist in style - lots of short, free verse style works, focusing on current events, identity and personal experiences. There is obviously some war content, as it is a continual experience for Ukrainians. But there is also a focus on nature and the land, a big part of Ukrainian life and identity. 

I found it a quick read and not wholly satisfying, but then translating poetry is a tough job. I did appreciate discovering so many new-to-me poets, and I also find it fascinating that there is not the kind of division between poetry, prose and non-fiction that there is in the literary circles I'm familiar with -- many of these authors also write fiction, essays, and more alongside their poetry. 

It's a good find if you want to be introduced to new Ukrainian voices, and there are some intriguing pieces included. I wasn't bowled over by the poetics but I did enjoy it overall, with a couple of poems that I particularly liked. I think it's one I'll need to reread a little more slowly and go over the works with more focus to really let them sink in. I'm glad it's available! 
 

Subterranean Fire

Subterranean Fire / Natalka Bilotserkivets
trans. by various translators
NY: Glagoslav, 2022.
178 p.

Today's read is a bit different: it's a collection of the selected poems of Natalka Bilotserkivets. She's a well-respected Ukrainian poet with a long career, and this is a collection of some of her best known work.

It's an interesting collection, as there are ten different translators represented here, and a few of the poems are shared two or three, even four times, showing different translators' approaches to the piece. I liked this feature a lot, as I often find that poetry is difficult to render out its original language. This gave a sense of transparency and a feeling of how translators work when they are dealing with poetry. And it also shows that a poem's vibe can be altered by the word choice and rythym when shifted into a new language. It really made me think about how much we can truly grasp a poem if we don't speak or read the original language.

That said, I do very much appreciate that I can read her poetry thanks to translators who do the hard work. These poems are all quite short, full of imagery and focused on daily life experience. They are more realist than fantastical, and I find them easy to grasp as there isn't too much focus on the language/sounds over images. She's been publishing since 1976 so there is a wide range of topic choice, but many of them deal with nature, everyday life, and human relationships. I found this collection gave a nice overview of her work, and as mentioned, the multiple translations side by side were also illuminating. 

If you're interested in checking out some Ukrainian poetry, this is definitely one to explore. 

NOTE: Translators are: James Brasfield with Lada Kolomiyets, Olena Jennings, Michael M. Naydan, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Andrew Sorokowski, Myroslava Stefaniuk, and Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

Poetry & Grief: Selah & Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths

Another two poetry collections that I read this month resonated with one another quite strongly: both deal with the grief of losing a spouse, a parent, a relationship through illness. And while stylistically they are quite different, they hold that space of grief in words.



Selah / Nora Gould   
London: Brick Books, c2016.
58 p.

This reminded me of another recent read, Sharon Butala's memoir of loss, Where I Live Now. Both authors are strong farm women who face the loss of their spouse and the lifestyle they'd expected to last, though in different ways.

Gould's story is one of living with a husband recently diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. She writes of her repressed reactions to this diagnosis, maintaining a brave front for everyone in the family; she talks about the tiny details, the clues that have been there for a long time; she shares decisions she had to make about how to live and who to tell. It's heart-rending and yet she also celebrates the strength of relationships and the dignity of individual lives no matter what. 

There are some beautiful lines in this book, but also clear and honest narrative. This style of plain speaking allows the emotion at its heart to resonate.

And I also think that this cover is exquisitely suited to this collection. It says so much in an apparently innocent image that echoes the tangles of dementia, in this farm setting.




Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths / Susan Paddon
London: Brick Books, c2014.
131 p.

The impending loss of a mother is interspersed with Chekhov's life and death in this debut collection.

Both Chekhov and Paddon's mother suffer from pulmonary illnesses. When she returns home to help care for her mother, she is also reading Chekhov and this series of poems flickers between the two.

There are poems as letters between Chekhov and his mostly absent wife Olga, and between Chekhov and his sister Masha. The relationships between them turn on both his brilliance and his constant illness, and Paddon is able to capture a Chekhovian flavour very effectively in her poems. 

Meanwhile, she reflects on her mother, their past and the unthinkable future without her. Tiny domestic details stand in for much larger meaning, as with Chekhov's storyline. The collection is divided up into monthly sections - April to September, and After. The conclusion is clear; there are two tragedies happening here, and the end is inescapable. But Paddon takes moments from the months spent together and captures them with precise language, with an attention to detail and a knack for just the right turn of phrase. The poems are never sentimental, though some are of course almost unbearably sad.

I felt the balance between these two threads was finely tuned, and that this whole collection was very striking. I read it slowly, as I had to put it down sometimes to let something sink in, to take a small breather from what was coming. It felt very much engaged with the present moment in each poem, and so much presence came through each one.


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And since both of these titles are from Brick Books I'll remind you again that until the end of April, there is a massive sale of pre-2017 titles bought from their website: $10 each. This is a great chance to pick up some of Brick's always excellent publications.

Poetry Month: Thoughts on Two Titles

Before Poetry Month ends, I want to be sure to share some thoughts on a few more collections I've been dipping into over the past few weeks. Some have been brand-new, some a bit older; and some have really spoken to each other thematically. Here are two I've finished most recently.


Auguries / Clea Roberts
London: Brick Books, c2017.
103 p.

This is a newly released title from Brick Books, one of my favourite poetry houses. It's one of the titles from their spring releases, coincidentally all by women. This is Clea Roberts' second collection, after her well-received and award-nominated first book, Here is Where We Disembark. 

I have not read that one, but now that I've been introduced to her work through this new volume, I may have to go back and look for it. Her writing is spare and beautiful; the cover of this book reflects the spaciousness and the sense of "augury" that is revealed in both poems and title.

As the publisher's copy says about this book:

"Written during a period in which Roberts both became a parent and lost a parent, the poems in Auguries lend themselves to prayer, surrender, celebration, reconciliation, meditation, and auspice."

It's true that there is both life burgeoning and ending in these poems, both in relation to her family and to the wider world as well. Poems set during the stillness of winter, in spring which uncovers "the dull carcass / of the neighbour's cat/ emerging from the melting/ snowbank" alongside the new shoots and growth, over long summers. Though the poems are mostly brief, both in actual length and subject, there is a feeling of expansive attention throughout. The natural world is made present, in perfect balance with the small and domestic moments between parents and children. 

I enjoyed the way that domestic, textile references were sprinkled into Roberts' descriptions of both nature and abstract notions: 

They made it through / to spring that way, with duty / stitched onto them like a / button  (from "Getting Wood"

setting your stories / out for the last time, /  reupholstering those that / would allow you to lie / more peacefully  (from "Storytelling")

there was no path at all, / just the forest's worry of branches, / knitted together and waiting.  (from "A Small Legacy")

This was a lovely and quiet collection that draws out evocative imagery with simple, clear effect. It's one I'll revisit. 

Lake of Two Mountains / Arleen Paré  
London: Brick Books, c2014.
83 p.

Another Brick Books volume, this one is a bit older and an award-winner (2014 Governor General's Award). I read it way back then... and I have just reread it, enjoying just as much this time. 

I think it is just as much about a place as Auguries is; about the way a family inhabits its place, through both memories and movement into the future. In this volume, Paré examines her family's history with the Lake of Two Mountains - the summers they spent there as children, the fraught ideas of ownership (especially in "Whose Lake?"), the history of the land itself. 

She describes the physical landscape with as much detail and care as she does her family stories, and adds in stories of the Trappist monastery across the lake. There is a jumble of historical fact, a naturalist's eye, emotionally drawn moments, and awareness of the future. There are poems about the Oka Crisis of 1990 and related issues of human presence on the land. This book is like a busy painting that at first glance looks clear and serene, but as you get closer you see more and more detail in it. 

And it's also full of beautiful language, with metaphors from the natural world colouring the family's descriptions. The lake is breathing, alive. This is another collection that presents sharp, memorable images to the reader, revealed like innocuous dull stones that shine once they're gathered wet from the shore. 

If you'd like, you can find more reviews of this title and a recording of Paré reading from this book, over at the publisher's website. 

And, just until the end of April, Brick Books is having a big sale of all pre-2017 titles -- you can order them for only $10 each. What a steal! I recommend checking it out; I've found some real gems at Brick Books. 

North End Love Songs

North End Love Songs / Katherena Vermette
Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford, c2012. 
108 p.

This poetry month, I must share some poetry. Here is a book I picked up after reading Vermette's The Break, to hear more from her, even if this was written first.

It's a collection looking at  life in North End Winnipeg, the same setting as her novel. Again, she is excellent at evoking a setting, a sense of place with just a few words, a few images. Here we have young girls walking down the middle of the road in summer, with slushes in hand; and I was instantly transported back to my own early teen years. She focuses on the relationships between young women, and on describing various girls using bird metaphors in one section, which I found especially appealing.

Her poems are short, and sparely written -- her style is simple but carries a lot within in. It's an honest voice, and realistic. The simplicity of the voice allows for the emotional connection to the story that's unfolding. In the second and third sections of the book, she delves into the life of her missing brother, just another young man who didn't make it home, and no law enforcement seemed very concerned about it at all. Small details of their relationship, like his heavy metal music playing all throughout the house, or asking to borrow his sweater the last time she saw him, add resonance to his absence.


The depth of character and straight talk about the political realities faced by the Indigenous community in Winnipeg is straightforward but reveals unexpected moments, like a spotlight aiming at a frozen moment - the same effect she created in her novel, though with (obviously) more narrative continuity there. I think this is an easy read in the sense of its structure, but with currents of content that will catch at a reader's emotions and perceptions.

She finishes with a powerful set of "verses in many voices", a poem called "I Am A North End Girl". It's a chorus of women's stories and voices which don't hold back. The effect is to hear lives being lived, without judgement being passed. This book is another important read that I'd recommend to all Canadians in this year of reconciliation -- it's a voice of understanding and experience that is much needed. North End Love Songs won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in 2013, and I hope more readers will discover her now through the attention on her new novel.

Karyotype

Karyotype / Kim Trainor
London: Brick Books, c2015.
99 p.

This brief, elegaic work really caught me as I read it this week. It's another collection of poetry inspired by scientific themes, in this case, the karyotype (essentially a picture of a person's chromosomes).

At the heart of the collection is the Beauty of Loulan, a mummy found in China's deserts, along the Silk Road. Trainor uses her fascination with the Beauty of Loulan to focus on many aspects of human life, from the sweep of history to the smallest element of what makes us individual.

She illuminates family life, both her own and as a bigger theme, via a viewing of a documentary on these mummies -- and describes the Beauty of Loulan, and the scientists examining her, in poetic images which nonetheless almost made me queasy at times, as they exhume and pick her apart.

But another aspect of this collection, alongside the woven strands of DNA that provide poetic inspiration, is Trainor's look at the woven textiles that are also found with the mummies. The references to weaving, both physically and more poetically, infuse this look at personhood and history. I kept thinking of the wonderful book Women's Work:the first 20,000 Years, which explores textiles and women's history, and the vital place that these skills held in cultures from the very beginning -- and which is by the same author (Elizabeth Wayland Barber) who also wrote a book just on the textiles of these mummies, which inspired Trainor's poems.

In the middle section of the book, Trainor focuses on words and texts which are ephemeral yet have staying power: poems of Akhmatova or Mandelstam, books that were destroyed in the firebombing of the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, notebooks recovered from the fields of WWII, and so on. It's heart-rending, showing the fragility of human life (as in the other poems in this book) but also what remains. 


These themes blend very well, and create a thoughtful reading experience. Humanity remains as physical artifact or as intellectual concept; whichever one it is, there is still meaning for the contemporary viewer.

How to Draw a Rhinoceros

How to Draw A Rhinoceros / Kate Sutherland
Toronto: BookThug, c2016.
120 p.

This is a debut collection by a law professor and poet, who also happens to be an acquaintance of mine. But that had no bearing on the fact that I adored this book of poetry.

I enjoyed it because of its cleverness, creative wordplay, and focus on science and on a specific theme - obviously the rhinoceros. I've made no secret of my love of the combination of science & poetry - from Alice Major to Madhur Anand, I've always enjoyed this combo.

This book takes the natural sciences as its subject. Sutherland examines the rhino from many angles; historical (the first touring rhino); artistic (Durer's rhinoceros sketches); biographical (sketches of some of the best known zoo owners/beast collectors in history); whimsical (Clara the rhino aboard ship, in law school, in space and more).

Each one has a different light to shed on the place that the rhinoceros has played in human history and culture. There are even some "found poems", something I always find intriguing - these ones are drawn from varied sources, from a 19th C. circus poster, from government reports of poaching, from Theodore Roosevelt & Ernest Hemingway's hunting narratives, as some examples.

The thematic thread - a rhinoceros - holds all of these witty poems together. The facets of the collection provide differing views of natural history and human interference in animal life, and hint of much more to be explored. Thankfully there are some notes on the writing of the poems at the end that may give interested readers a bit more to search out, now that the never-before-considered topic of the rhinoceros seems so fascinating. 

If you have any interest in history, natural or otherwise, and welcome an encounter with new poets and unexpected obsessions, I recommend finding a copy of this satisfyingly enjoyable read.

Essential Jay Macpherson

The Essential Jay Macpherson / selected by Melissa Dalgleish.
Erin, ON: Porcupine's Quill, c2017.
63 p.

This is another volume in Porcupine Quill's Essential Poets series, a series I've enjoyed over the years for its beauty and cohesion of design. Also because there have been some pretty great poets featured, from my favourite, PK Page, to this new volume of poems by a contemporary of Page but a poet I've never read despite my Canlit degree -- Jay Macpherson. I was delighted by this collection and by the discovery of a clever and witty poet whose style reminds me in some ways of the arch humour of Margaret Atwood. 

In the publisher's blurb and the intro to this book, they introduce Macpherson as "one of the leading figures of Canada’s mythopoeic modernist movement." She was acquainted with Robert Graves, influenced by Jung and by myths biblical, classical and Sumerian, and had a long-standing relationship with Northrop Frye. She also taught, and influenced generations of Canadian poets, like Atwood. 

I enjoyed these concise, deliberate poems; wry, clever, referencing literature and the bookish past, while yet being freshly modern and told with a feminine slant. She doesn't shy away from topics like racism in the academy (The Ballad of Dr. Coolie) or questions of female autonomy. There is much solemn mythologizing, but also a lot of quick humour and language play. I think I could probably read these over again a few more times before beginning to get a grasp on them -- it feels like there is a lot more to them to explore. 

When I first opened the book, I started at the end and flipped toward the front. Thus the first poem I read is the final one in the book, a very brief and funny poem called "A Winter Night (Long After Lampman)". Those who've studied Canadian poetry and had Lampman's poems of rural visioning and nature worship as part of your experience will most likely find this as entertaining as I did, as Macpherson takes the natural world extolled by Lampman and neatly turns it on its head. 

Anyhow, if you've never read one of the Essential Poets in this series, I do encourage you to take a look. This volume, as well as PK Page and Don Coles, have been favourites of mine. The beautiful paper, covers and endpapers make a lovely object as well. 

You can also read a couple of Macpherson's poems at the publisher's website, including her first poem ever published, Non-Identification, which was published when she was fifteen. 

Banquet of Donny & Ari

The Banquet of Donny &  Ari / Naomi Guttman
London: Brick Books, c2015.
89 p.

Poetry inspired by mythological stories always appeals to me. This one is a funny one though; the premise on the back cover says:

If Dionysus and Ariadne lived in Montreal in the late twentieth century, would he serve veal stuffed with apples and paté de fois gras? Coach nubile young singers in a performance of L’Orfeo? Would Ariadne’s thread be fashioned into tapestries of furious elegy in the face of environmental catastrophe? Would their marriage survive?

But the characters themselves feel like regular modern people, not godlike at all. They're a married couple, Donny and Ari. Donny is a music professor, teaching singers (often lovely young ones) while Ari is an artist, with many poems about her weaving. She's also fallen into despair about the state of the world, and it affects her relationships, to her family and to food. Donny is a gourmet cook, Ari has distanced herself from food and its role in their lives.

They also have two sons, Onno and Stephan, and many of the tender moments in the book have to do with these boys. In one example, Donny takes them to Newfoundland for a holiday at his mother's in one poem, leaving Ari in Montreal. The three of them together are sweetly evoked, again with many food related phrases.

The poems tell a story of this marriage, of survival in our modern world with all its perils both politic and intimate. I really appreciated the style; the poems range between these characters, using their individual pursuits with their specific vocabularies to illuminate the larger picture. And the web of relationships, to children, parents, extended family, pets and objects, is finely drawn. And in the end, despite the vicissitudes of life, their relationship remains. It's an operetta composed of poems which depend on character to propel the story, but which equally rely on the beauty of Guttman's language to capture and enthrall the reader.


And for a few more days, this relationship focused collection can be found for $10 as part of Brick Books' special February offer on a selected list of their titles. Check it out while it lasts.

Careen with Carolyn Smart

Careen / Carolyn Smart
London, ON: Brick Books, c2015.
96 p.

I first read Carolyn Smart's poetry when I discovered her collection Hooked, courtesy of the publisher, a few years ago. It features 7 women, all outsiders of some sort, telling their stories in their own voices.

Clearly, Smart wasn't done with outlaws, as this book is a multifaceted approach to the tale of Bonnie & Clyde, told in many voices, from the main characters to those of others in their gang, Clyde's brothers, their wives, mothers, neighbours, and a lawman hunting them down.

It also shares media stories, and how the newspapers got things wrong in their rush to create legends out of these two. Nothing too relevant, right? 

I felt like I knew a fair amount about the mythology of Bonnie & Clyde before I read this book. But as I went through it, hearing many angles and details I never knew, I realized most of what I knew came from the movies. And as W.D. Jones says in one of his poems, "That damn fool movie made it look so fine, / like it was sorta glamorous, our ride, but it was hell."

There is constant violence, longing, and hardscrabble living in these poems. It's a time when disaffected youth took to the road in the face of poverty and no other options for their lives. When angst and anger and weariness wore down so many families, and the lack of a future made them reckless. When the open road promised something, a kind of freedom, even if was predicated on complete alienation from social norms.

But the heart of the book is the disastrous, codependent relationships between Bonnie & Clyde, and between his brother Buck and his third wife Blanche; these women just wanted to love and be loved, to be cherished, even if this meant an outlaw life for them. It's finely drawn with shadings of desire, pathos and understanding, and creates a full and sobering life for them. As Bonnie says on first seeing Clyde Barrow:

Why don't something happen? I wrote in my diary
until one night it did.

From the first second I saw him I knew he was the one: he wanted
all I wanted from a life, to claw our way to where we aimed to be.

I found these poems both beautifully written and very touching -- somehow completely emotionally engaging without romanticizing or sentimentalizing this criminal life. It was a book that caught me and made me keep reading to find out what happened to everyone, even while wanting to avert my eyes knowing it wouldn't end well. 

And for the month of February (2017) only, Brick Books is having a $10 special on 10 specially selected reads -- and Careen is one of them! A great chance to pick it up and check out Brick Books' lovely production values as well.

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Further Reading

The storytelling and raw voices in this book remind me of a couple of other reads -- both the verse novels of Ellen Hopkins, all dealing with life on the grittier side, and the great Stefan Zweig's The Post Office Girl, a story of a girl stifled by poverty and lack of a future who meets up with just the right/wrong man at the right/wrong time.

Alphabetique, with Blushes

Here I have two recent reads by Molly Peacock, an American born poet who lives in Toronto & counts herself as half Canadian as well.

I've read her book about poetry previously (How to Read a Poem & Start a Poetry Circle); now I'm getting to some of her actual poetry.


The Second Blush / Molly Peacock
New York: Norton, c2008.
85 p.

So as I mentioned, I haven't read much of Molly Peacock's poetry before. This collection is about domesticity, about her life with her husband, and the role of love in shaping our lives. It's very readable, 'poetry' in the sense that most new readers would recognize. 

She uses a lot of end rhyme, with short poems describing moments that are easily grasped. Yet they aren't simple, exactly. I found many of them evocative of emotion, of daily living, in an understated but resonant way. "Happy Diary", a list of things that have made the poet happy, complete with rhyme, is obvious but still lovely. And she takes basic activities like doing dishes, having a picnic, or going to yoga and turns them into poetry. 

I liked this collection;  it's set out in four sections and each has a certain feel to it. She is talking to the reader, inviting them into her poems, and it gives the book a warm and welcoming feel. I found that one, "The Flaw", was a favourite, as she used textiles as a metaphor, which I can really appreciate. And one called "Warrior Pose", about yoga class, has a few lines in it that struck me in our current climate. 

...
How can we think ourselves into the full bloom
of power and vigilance? Perhaps
by imagining buds curled in our palms,
opened by the ants of persistence
and fed by new focus into peony flowers,
huge, magenta and smothering our enemy's
surprised face with lunging beauty.


You can read some of the poems from this volume at her website (and listen to her read one) -- including my favourite, The Flaw.



Alphabetique / Molly Peacock; illus. by Kara Kosaka
Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, c2014.
160 p.

The charm of this book lies heavily in its gorgeous collage illustrations done by Vancouver's Kara Kosaka - you can see them all at her website. They are simply beautiful.

In its alphabetic focus, size and art, this book recalls two other titles that might be of similar interest to readers: Diane Schoemperlen's recent By the Book, and the non-illustrated but very brief & moving The End of the Alphabet by C.S. Richardson, which to me has the same quirky, intellectual tone.

In this book, Peacock posits a life and existence for each letter of our alphabet. And in each brief tale, the letter lives a little. With a lot of alliteration. I could continue, it's curiously catching. 

It's a mannered and clever structure, depending on wordplay and archness in the storytelling. The idea shapes the content. It's amusing, but don't read them all together at once; space out the stories so you don't get overwhelmed by the conceit and can enjoy each tale separately. I found that I had to take a little break from it after a few letters, and then just kept picking it up to read one or two more in between other books. That worked well. I enjoyed some letters more than others, of course, and I also liked how previous stories worked their way into later ones. 

I thought it was interesting and intellectually satisfying, but the beautiful images are really what have stuck with me. It's a small volume, with both images and words giving a bit of a dreamy feel to the reading experience.

Anne Carson's Short Talks

Short Talks / Anne Carson
London: Brick Books, 2015, c1992.
75 p.

Another in Brick Books' reissuing of classics from their backlist, done in honour of their 40th year of existence, this was the first volume of the collection.

It's fabulous.

Anne Carson is a classics professor and a former McArthur Fellow. She's won many awards for her work, but I must admit that personally I felt that this volume was the one I've most easily understood, absorbed, and enjoyed.

It's a collection of small poems in the form of paragraphs, ranging from a couple of sentences to nearly a full page. They are reflections on various themes, some funny, some wistful, all clever. Her study of classics comes through in many of the poems; intelligence and wit shine in this book.

A few of them reminded me of Sei Shonagon, and by extension also Suzanne Buffam's recent A Pillow Book. The resemblance is clear in pieces like "A Short Talk on Major and Minor", which starts with a brief list of each (in sentence format). There is also a certain similarity in the attention to daily life & the minutiae of experience between these two books.

There are other poems that are short talks on a topic which, as it turns out, the poem is really not about at all. And some of the very shortest pieces turned out to be favourites. I think the one that struck me most was "A Short Talk on the Sensation of Aeroplane Takeoff" -- it's a sentence long, but what a sentence! Joyful and unexpected. 

Another great reissue from Brick Books, I enjoyed musing over this one slowly and uncovering some new ways of perceiving the world. Recommended.



Listen to Anne reading a few of these pieces here:

A Really Good Brown Girl

A Really Good Brown Girl / Marilyn Dumont
London: Brick Books, 2016, c1996.
77 p.

This reprint in the Brick Books Classics series is such a gem. I never did read it in its original incarnation, so was pleased to see it in this new series.

This new edition has an introduction by Lee Maracle and an afterword by Marilyn Dumont, which adds to the context of these poems from their original appearance in the 90s to our current setting.

But these poems really do stand on their own. Dumont's Metis heritage infuses this collection, with a set called "Squaw Poems":

“I am in a university classroom, an English professor corrects my spoken/ English in front of the class. I say, “really good.” He say, “You mean/ really well, don’t you?” I glare at him and say emphatically, “No I/ mean really good.” (from Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl)

or from The White Judges:

"At supper eleven of us would stare down a pot of/ moose stew, bannock and tea, while outside the white judges sat/ encircling our house.

And they waited to judge/ "

And also another set, "White Noise", talking about a different vantage point.

"There/ are times when I feel that if I don’t have a circle or the number four/ or legend in my poetry, I am lost, just a fading urban Indian…” (from Circle the Wagons)

or 

"I say I'm Metis like it's an/ apology, and he says, "Mmh," like he forgives me, like he's got a big/ heart and mine's pumping diluted blood..." (from Leather and Naugahyde)

The poems in this book express her experiences passionately, and she talks about writing them, in her afterword. She mentions that many of them were written in the 80s, while she was reading many other Indigenous authors from across the world as well as black American women writers. All of these fed into this collection, as she created "expressions of confusion, sadness, hurt, anger and rage" hoping that it would free other Indigenous women to express their lives as well. 

It's a beautiful collection, with sections that may make non-Indigenous readers uncomfortable at times, questioning our own assumptions and understandings. But also enlightening and engaging for a reader like me. There was one poem that I found particularly lovely in the way it describes what a book can do for us. From Horsefly Blue:

"doesn't this light remind you of all those other times
you looked up from your reading
and were expecting to see
change and nothing
did change except the way
you looked, the way you met the light,
greeted it at the door as a friend
or smiled at it from a distance as your lover?"

I loved this book, and read it all in one big gulp, then went back to revisit it. There is so much in it to look at again and again. I'll close with one haunting image, in an excerpt from a poem that says so much with so few words, The Sound of One Hand Drumming:

"the    small    single    words
of brown women hang on
clotheslines stiff in winter and
thaw only in early spring but
no one takes them off the line because
no one wants last year's clothes,
they're the wrong colour and out of fashion and
if dead white men stopped writing for one thousand years and
only brown women wrote
that wouldn't be enough..."

I'm glad Brick Books reissued this classic so that I could finally read it.

Among the Lost

Among the Lost: in Dante's Wake: Book 2 / Seth Steinzor
Burlington, VT: Fomite Press, c2016.
220 p.

I was recently offered a chance to read this, via Poetic Book Tours. I quickly agreed, as I read Book One in this set of Dante-inspired poems, back in 2011 and was intrigued by what might be offered in this follow up. I'm glad I got the chance to shadow this poetic journey a little further!

This second volume carries on, from Book One's Inferno, to Book Two's Purgatory. In this case, purgatory is a not a jagged mountain but a cityscape. Dante still guides our narrator at the beginning of this book, as they fall from Hell and fling themselves into purgatory. As Dante says, 

This is the City of Purgatory. Remember,
now it's your world, no longer mine.
You, who scrape the tops off mountains for coal,
who fill the valleys with garbage, who scrape the

meadows level for parking, who fill the marshes with
concrete and pylons, who build and tear down,
who level the high places and raise the low, have
flattened Purgatory. Now the
eminence that was lit when your lives were dark
is worn away, by you! And you
have grown your city upon and with its rubble.

The flavour of the story goes on much like this. The structure comprises 33 Cantos, following the narrator, also named Seth, as he pursues his track through Purgatory, still in search of Victoria (who impelled him to begin his search originally). 

In this volume, once Dante situates him in his surroundings -- after landing in a hospital room with a woman giving birth, initially -- Seth is left to his own devices to wander and try to determine where he should be heading. His only instruction is to meet Dante at the Presidential Library at sundown.

Seth begins a trek with many asides and many distractions, almost giving up. He meets many different kinds of people, encounters protestors, homeless men, young skateboarders, union men, famous celebrities, and more. Each has some kind of lesson to impart, even if unknowingly. Finally he arrives at what he thinks he is seeking. But of course, it is not what he's expecting. The range of characters and manners of speech that Steinzor includes in this book is what made it most compelling for me; I kept reading to discover who in the world (who in Purgatory?) Seth would enounter next.

I found this volume a little less satisfying than the first, probably partly because I'm much less familiar with the Purgatorio than with the Inferno, and because there were, again, many references to American politicians/current events that I just don't get the nuances of, despite knowing about them in a broader sense.

But the narrative style was still very enjoyable, with some of the writing really standing out for me. I was especially fond of this passage from the closing pages (which sets up the final volume to come quite nicely)

Distant, the city.
Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet;
hush, hush, hush, hush
say the waters that fill this crescent I stand on.
My breaths join their flow and ebb.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
How many atoms compose a star? The
night is replete with angels dancing on pinpricks.....

If you're interested in modern poetry responding to the classics, from the vantage point of our current socioeconomic and political situation, this might just be the series for you.

Thank you to Poetic Book Tours & Seth Steinzor for the copy of Among the Lost & the chance to participate in this book tour.


Tour Schedule:

Jan. 10: the bookworm (Review)
Jan. 12: Wall-to-Wall Books (Review)
Jan. 17: Nerdy Talks Books (Review)
Jan. 18: The Indextrious Reader (Review)
Jan. 19: Everything Distils Into Reading (Review)
Jan. 20: Eva Lucia Reviews (Review)
Jan. 21: Readaholic Zone (Review)
Jan. 23: Book Nerd Demigod (Review)
Jan. 24: Eva Lucia Reviews (Interview)
Jan. 25: Diary of an Eccentric (Guest Post)
Jan. 30: Necromancy Never Pays (Review)

Follow the blog tour with hashtag #AmongtheLost