Whetstone by Lorna Crozier

There is a brand of quiet poetry that appeals to and influences me in my own work. To that end, I’ve returned to Lorna Crozier’s work, specifically her collection Whetstone. As with any similar collection, some of the poems resonated and others did not. It’s more about occupying the same psychic space and allowing yourself to be guided along.

The titular poem stands out as one of the highlights for me, particularly because of its vivid first lines: “The stone that sharpens stars, / their slow slice across the sky” (13). Jan Zwicky’s essay about resonance in poetry has proven enduring in the way I think about poems. Resonance often seems to use juxtaposition as a medium for finding connection, and following this idea of a stone sharpening stars in the sky, Crozier says, “it must have mingled with the gravel / on the road I run. Now its light / has reached my eyes” (13). I can see a parallel between the smattering of stars across a night sky and the stream of stones that form the gravel, every once in a while one standing out. There’s also an odd inversion here, though, because typically we’d think of the light from stars’ light taking years to reach our eyes, but the pronoun here refers to the whetstone. It intimates the slow labour of sharpening but at the same time, the stone is placing a demand on the speaker: “What does it want from me? / To be moved into another / galaxy of knives?” (13). Alternatively, the stone could be making a call “to be looked upon and left / where it has found me?” (13). The stone is given agency, while the speaker is being called towards agency. Or, perhaps there’s no difference between them: “Maybe it’s just a stone // among other stones, desireless / and unafflicted” (13). As with other poems in this mode, a small phenomenon is then extended into something much larger, more cosmic. The narrator reflects: “Does it know I am // dulled by God? / His negligence, / his under-use” (13). I think the poem, at its core, is a matter of agency and responsiveness, and ultimately the choice to either act or not act.

Crozier’s mode here feels so similar to Jan Zwicky; I notice her guidance is documented in the acknowledgements of Whetstone. This influence also emerges in the meditations on nature. The book is largely wintery, and “Prayers of Snow” sets that tone, which reads, in part, as follows:

Snow is a lesson in forgetting, a lesson in gravity,
a long loose sentence spiralling to the end of thought.
It prays to the young god robed in white, his ascent
a blizzard returning to the sky. (11)

As I suggested, there’s a kind of cosmic quality imbued to the natural phenomenon. The laws of the universe (gravity) are embodied by a particular, observable phenomenon (snow). Having tangible images like this really gives readers something to latch onto. Imagining snow as a kind of language is also delightful; the snow streams down as a “long loose sentence” and the odd inversion of a blizzard returning to the sky is a nice touch. The poem then reads as a kind of prayer and ultimately the snow “closes the gap / between drought and plenty, belief and blasphemy, / the ear and silence” (11). The idea of snow being something that joins disparate phenomena together feels true. Consider the way that an endless stretch of white snow erases distinct features and makes everything into one canvas. Snow becomes “a migration of birds / without eyes, without feet, who settle white in branches / on breasts and wings. When you stride through snow / in dreams of waking, you are a star-walker. / It prays to the soft fall of your books” (11). I like the way the snow prays to the world around it and the distinction between snow and other things fades: snow and birds are the same. The idea of being a “star-walker” every time you walk through snow also gives the poem its cosmic quality and makes sense with the idea of snow being star-like in its shape.

There are other poems that have a similar motif: a totalizing phenomenon that reveals connection. In the poem “Solitude,” for example, Crozier describes “Sometimes the dark’s so dark / nothing can move through it” (38). She specifies that the wind and the geese can’t move through it, despite how an hour ago they “charcoaled their journey from star to star” (38). I love noun-verbs, and “charcoaled” here feels evocative. Again, there’s a motif of stars that stand as nodes in a network of connection. The poem then continues to describe in second person that “you love the lake at night / because water keeps its distance / yet carries sound, crackled and clear, from the farthest shore” (38). Again, there’s these spaces that are vast and empty but serve as bridges of connection to the farthest shores. Crozier again gets more precise: “the hard notes of a party / drift through the screen from cabins / on the southern spit” (38). If you’ve ever sat by water in the darkness, you know these two emptinesses that connect: “You said / nothing moves through this dark. / But music does, and voices, / and you go on” (38).

One more poem I’d like to comment on is “The Physics of the Rose.” The poem opens with an epigraph about the electron and us living in different worlds. In describing the rose, Crozier says “each petal [is] an eyelid, blood-fused, over what / invisible eyes!” (24). The idea of an eyelid sealed shut by blood is both beautiful and horrific. Continuing to describe the rose, “fold after fold, its silence so enclosed / it seems a kind of speaking, light’s muted // hallelujah brought inside” (24). Crozier reads into silences and finds their voice. She looks into the quiet phenomena and imbues them with a voice, just as these roses speak in the silence of their folds. Later in the short poem, she describes it as “the antithesis of absence, / of stillness, its red fist unfurling / this, this and this, a daring to be open / so immoderate you want to say outrageous, / you want to say ridiculous, but can’t” (24). The idea of the rose being the antithesis of absence is a compelling phrase and emulates Crozier’s philosophy. Despite the silence, the rose speaks. Despite this, there’s a dark tone that gets couched in pretty imagery. Crozier describes the rose as “shocking as a heart cut out and set in glass” (24). The gruesome undertone draws attention to that which is otherwise quiet. The final lines of the poem then invert our expectations: suddenly we are the one being watched. She writes, “Clothed or not, you stand naked in its eyes. / Small and unadorned, / without a lover” (24). We are no longer the observer; the brilliant presence of the rose is observing us…I suppose when you stare into the rose long enough the rose stares back?

Throughout the collection, there were a number of poems I liked, a few that I loved, and a few I failed to linger on. It’s a good collection and, as with all poetry, the more time I spent thinking through it the more I was able to see what Crozier’s mission might be. It’s worth reading and I’ll stand by my philosophy that poems are best read as part of a full collection. The more time you spend with a voice, the more you’re able to hear its nuances.

Happy reading!

courbure de la terre par jonas fortier

  My reviews of French poetry books are always the most niche, but at least once a year I try to expand my horizons and practice my second language…so here we go with courbure de la terre par jonas fortier.

courbure de la terre essentially translates to “curvature of the earth.” The title feels appropriate not only because so many of the poems feature round elements, curves along the horizon, but because there’s something about the tone of the poems that also feels soft. fortier is not a writer of hard edges but of gentle invitations. The poet takes on a mode that feels like some early French symbolists, drawing inspiration from things like the moon or rain drops and finding the deeper significance that is sometimes unspeakable.

There’s a layer of irony to me making that statement, though. There’s a sequence of poems in which fortier reflects on writing directly and provides a list of the types of poet he is not, outlining both motivations and processes for writing. He’s not a poet that works in a factory in unimaginable conditions; he’s not the poet that stays up all night and kills himself at twenty three. These tropes of the depressive and the isolated don’t reflect him, so while there are some symbols that are resonant with classic poetry, he still distances himself from their tradition.

I appreciate the art of quiet poems. fortier has a real observational quality in his work, rendering clouds and rain drops into art. The poem sequences are often untitled, and it blurs the line between individual poems and sequences of connected pieces, but the section <<Le sommeil est le neveu de la mort>> contains a piece that feels representative of the precise quality of fortier’s style. The piece reads, in part, as follows:

cette peine-là
est de saison, brume
démanchée contre le ciel
il se met à pleuvoir de minuscules araignées
des étoiles comme nous mais mieux
des gouttelettes encore poudreuses
comme des briques muettes
des flèches d’averse
viennent crever dans nos bras faibles
et nous portons à nos lèvres
des souvenirs d’herbes (54)

The description has that touch of tenderness and devastation that characterizes what I often think about in terms of a “poetic mode.” I particularly appreciate the rain being described like tiny spiders, rendering the droplets somewhat creepy, but also as stars “like us but better.” The line breaks sometimes make the lines read ambiguously, but the poem goes on to describe the droplets like falling arrows or bricks and there’s a heaviness there that counterbalances the softness of the powdery rain drops.

The section <<Vérités permanentes>> has some of my favourite pieces, which extend fortier’s motifs about the sky and clouds. In one piece, the speaker identifies himself and another (<<nous>>) as parallel to clouds, carrying the names of their fathers and the clothes of their mothers and big beards that have grown over time and having bodies like grapes where you can’t see inside. The poem’s volta explores a new angle and fortier explores the future, made of houses with hard planks that speak as you step on them. He talks about the opening of the house, the opening of the future, letting the wind speak through open doors and windows. The poem ends on the idea of the moon guiding people to the house alongside thin, key-like trees. It reads better in French: <<d’arbres minces / comme des clés>> (62). The extended metaphor works beautifully and mimics fortier’s approach: you are being trained as a reader how to listen to space, how to hear messages from your environment. It’s hard to translate here but there’s also an aural quality to the work, where particular sounds echo with a slight difference: dures / dureté, de soi / ce soir, and so on. These give the poem a coherence that feels like it touches on something other-worldly. 

The collection also reflects a fair deal on language itself. The section <<Vérités permanentes>> opens with a reflection on grammar:

il y a un temps
grammatical
qu’on appelle
vérité permanente

je n’en avais jamais entendu parler
jusqu’à ce qu’un Bescherelle
me révèle son nom

c’est arrivé par surprise
comme la lettre d’un ami cher
après des années passées
dans la contemplation
d’un pays lointain

j’ai eu une émotion très positive
bien que si proche de la tristesse
en apprenant que la vérité
peut être temps présent (59)

There’s a nostalgia to the piece that resonated with me, namely the idea of learning grammar from a Bescherelle (French Immersion kids represent!). I like, too, the sense of revelation that studying grammar brings and the reality that opens up. I also appreciate the tenuousness of the border between positive emotions and sadness and the way those converge at moments of clarity.

I can’t pretend that I understood the nuances of each of the poems in this collection. I do feel that the tone read as tender and a little tragic, but reflective and appreciative of the world. I flagged one of the early poems in the collection because I felt I didn’t have the vocabulary to really delve in. As I translated it a little more, the imagery stood out more dramatically: it was about kids “chained to strollers” watching birds and knowing that life is invented by the spirits of our dead, who have become <<essaims d’abeilles>> (24)—that is, swarms of bees. The poem took on a new philosophic intensity and then becomes a reflection on time reflected in the northern hemisphere collapsing like wet butter on the sidewalk. 

Another piece I revisited reinforced the idea of the poet as a wanderer. I’m tempted to put him alongside Baudelaire as a flanneur, but I’ll resist easy categorization. Essentially, there’s a poem about wandering but then clinging to certain phenomena, including the increasingly strange—like urine accumulating in ant nests (37). There’s an endless searching and a turning up of the speaker’s eyes to the stars…but we’d call them eggs (37). It’s an odd line to end on, a bit of cheekiness that I feel undermines the self-seriousness of the wandering poet’s approach.

Returning to the section <<Le sommeil est le neveu de la mort>>, there’s a piece that ties these elements together. There’s a roundness to the piece, the observational quality, and the sense of wandering and searching that fortier highlights. The poem has a simplicity to it: it lists different types of droplets—respiration, cuts and injuries, brilliant drops (52). The poet rolls like a dice all while marching on, ready to scale mountains and appreciating the thyme growing at the side of the sidewalk.

I admit I’m not the perfect audience for this book; I appreciate the language, but am not apt enough to appreciate its nuances and possibilities. The poems felt tender and beautiful and quiet, with flashes of the philosophical, which I tend to enjoy. It’s a nice collection and if you’re a reader of French, I’d love to hear you extend the conversation.

Happy reading!

Year Zero by Brian Henderson

Brian Henderson is a Canadian poet that was a big inspiration to me in the early years of me seriously writing any poetry and it’s kind of scary to me to think that the last time I read his work was over a decade ago. I read his collections Sharawadji and Nerve Language, and this time around I’ve jumped to one of Henderson’s mid-career collections, Year Zero. One of the things I’ve found inspiring in Henderson’s poetry collections is their unconventional nature; one of the first poems of his that I read is presented, essentially, as two poems in a side-by-side conversation and I remember seeing him as an experimenter to follow.

Year Zero is perhaps not as experimental as some of Henderson’s later works, but still had quite a bit to latch onto in terms of imagery and insight. There’s a metaphysical bent to a number of the poems that finds meaning in the environment. In the opening poem, “Shadow Lake,” Henderson describes in a brief ten lines, a dark lake: “That lake / with its language of swallowed things” (11). This idea of a lake swallowing detritus and making it a language, communicating through that which it absorbs rather than what it expels is an interesting inversion. It also evokes a mournful tone in its final stanza: “The air is rich with unfinishedness // Things want to be free / impossibly / without having to be lost” (11). The meditative register presents a compelling juxtaposition. The incomplete is presented as richness—it makes me think of Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy that posits possibility as the ultimate identity of something. Here, what is absent is what gives the air its richness. But Henderson also highlights a depressing reality: that being free entails also being lost; the liberatory and the elegiac operate in tandem.

I think it’s worth noting just how many of these poems are written in dedication. Indeed, the afterword of the text orbits a number of deaths. Henderson describes the manuscript not as an elegy but instead “cut glass, folding water, streaming wind” (59). He goes on to describe the complications of dedicating the book to particular people before noting that he “felt how impossible even multiple dedications were, since the relationships were of such differing textures” (59). He notes that the dedications would “all be cracking off in different directions, felt wrong, and would overburden the book, like a tombstone even though, perhaps even especially because, they are at the heart of it—not their names, but them” (59). This sadness, this sense of loss, does seem to permeate through the text.

“In the Old Garden,” for example, begins with the lines “You have hardly begun the poem /  the voice says, and yet /  many people have already died” (14). There’s a tension in the need for immediacy—if we don’t write it now, it means more people will die. At the same time, there’s a richness and endlessness to the work: “We open even a word like a book / I try to say” (14). If every word is a book, then every book is infinite. The line continues, though into a kind of futility: “but how does this help, / when in the living / every lit vein runs to the golden stigmas of the heart” (14). The reflective poem continues with the idea that the body and the word are connected and “Perhaps the only real word is /  the one the body speaks /  as a whole life” (14). We see Henderson grappling with existential and linguistic themes here, as elsewhere, and it does seem to speak in the writerly register I find so resonant.

Throughout the collection, we also see a return to the idea of the incomplete, the unfinished. As in the first poem where the air is rich with unfinishedness, “There is a Kind of Music” also connects to the idea: “There is a kind of music / an unfinished music / to this constantly moving house / an opening and closing of breath / like a tide of shadows” (29). The piece once more gestures towards a spaciousness and emptiness filled with something not quite done. The unfinished music acts as a kind of furniture. The emphasis for the speaker of the poem is placed on listening for the house’s noises “and on not hearing it” (29). The poem becomes even more existential, referencing the idea of “Death [as] a stagger in the rhythm” (29). The stanzas then speed through a life and “We come all this way to lose ourselves finally / and it’s family we find ourselves doing it in” (29). The poem becomes another meditation on language, “another language / an island the music moves / sweeps as if it had hands / and nearly comforts” (29). There’s a tension here between the power and futility of language. At the same time that language can sweep things away, it only “nearly comforts” — there’s an incompleteness even in this edifying feature of the human experience.

I have to admit that a number of Henderson’s poems are difficult to parse. They are expansive in their scope and, sometimes, it is hard to see how the pieces are connected. The focus is not as immediately obvious as some more imagistic poems. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but it’s clear that to fully appreciate these poems, it requires time and patience.

That said, Henderson does not shy away from the imagistic. For example, the poem “The Hummingbird” is replete with specific images. The poem starts with the idea that “green lanterns of leaves cling / to their lifelines, / ragged with storm light” (45). Meanwhile, “The lake crashes over / lake-made dykes of the marsh / slewing sand / back over blades of yellow iris” (45). The scene unfolds in more rich detail, slowly introducing characters, an ambiguous ‘you’ and an ambiguous ‘I.’ ‘You’ is described as being undermined like the water maple by “incremental dynamite of surf” and toppling into the wet lap of a green torch being thrown away in slow motion. The ‘I’ of the poem reflects: “I have nothing if not this / forever unravelling shore” (45). I love that line because I love boundaries blurring and here the unravelling shore presents an image of flux, the “line between water and water” (45). This is the foundation for where the speaker stands. That image of tumult and instability and excess feels like an appropriate image for capturing a state of mind, consistent with how the speaker is “no longer sure / what direction forward represents” (45). Meanwhile, nature has a way: “Maple fruit torque through the wind, / propellers of future raining down” (45). I like that image; it brings back a childhood memory of watching the maple keys drift, but here the image is inverted as reflective of the future.

“Earth Ward” cycles through a number of these key motifs, as well. The poem starts with the idea of the “unfinished,” this time in the form of an unfinished “centre [that] still gathers / to scatter” (49). Henderson again returns to the idea of the incomplete and the unstable. I love the onomatopoeiac line that follows: “Bees unzip the tropic of afternoon” (49). It evokes Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”—the center gathers to scatter, everything is unfinished, the world is being unzipped, coming apart. The poem then goes on to describe the “weaving heat lines” and “the ear thinks space” (49). It’s an image of summer and that sensory confusion of wavy lines on the road and the buzzsaw of summer. The poem later takes an odd turn where it is August and the speaker is “listening, listening / at the door of your house, / my ear to taut skin” (49). It suggests the house to be a living entity (indeed, Henderson describes “your human hearth”) but then once again shifts to the idea of an ear on “the wild of the heart” (49) and describes thinking as growing like a bud into wood into bone. This growth and solidifying of thinking is personified through naturalistic imagery. Like in some of the other poems I see as representative, there’s an insertion and identification of the speaker with a natural phenomenon.

This summer poem stands in contrast with a cold one: “February: Flash Point.” The role of memory is once again foregrounded: “the air / a continuous flash that forgets / everything it once knew” (44). The emptiness in the air is this time a more active forgetting. February is presented as a time of transformation: a forgetting of the old, and “like weather, you move over within yourself, / an adoration, and disown the / shapes you blow through” (44). I feel like I calcify throughout winter, so it’s interesting to suggest a freshness and newness in the height of a frozen season. Henderson continues, “You are gestating incandescence / whose shadow shortens / to that telling moment I can tell and / tell, and say nothing of” (44). I’m not quite sure how to process these lines. The idea of an incandescence growing inside sounds like an optimistic shift within the self. That said, “whose shadow shortens” reads ambiguously to me. The incandescence and the shadow seem to be in tension with one another. Like other references to language, the ‘I’ of the poem suggests additional telling and telling—more words—and yet “say nothing of” implies an inability to communicate. Ultimately, there is “strewing the ash of snow, a drift of selves / in the tiny creases of your landscape” (44). I love that idea of a number of selves drifting together. Especially when considering the uniqueness of snowflakes, here there is the suggestion that they are all components of a similar self. It’s a collective identity and “you are filled to your season / with others” (44). The image of snow drifting together and blending feels authentic to who we are as people: collective selves loosely linked together, and the poem leads to an engaging final two lines. We are filled to our seasons with others “welcoming us to the eye / of the blizzard” (44). This amalgamation is a lovely end to the piece, an optimism about what I consider the cruellest month.

Ultimately, Henderson’s poems are rich with perspective and layered with meaning. His core themes engage me: language, space, emptiness, change, amorphousness. There are a handful of poems that I felt I could latch onto, though I admit I was hoping for some more experimental pieces. These are all poems that take time. It’s not the easily accessible work of some other modern poets; it’s the work of someone thinking deeply and considering carefully how these words can create meaning or gesture beyond themselves. As readers, we have to consider his words just as carefully in order to latch on. Year Zero is a reminder that poetry is at its best when it’s slow.

Happy slow reading!

The Great Enigma by Tomas Tranströmer

  In 2011, Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was as good a reason as any to put his poetry on my radar. I typically prefer reading full books of poems as intended, but I found a good deal on The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems and figured I might as well get a sampling from Tranströmer’s decades of writing.

I’d consider it high praise to say that a writer makes me think more poetically. As I was reading The Great Enigma, I found myself plucking little fragments of language from their drift amid the ether. While I’m somewhat limited in my ability to comment on the cohesiveness of the poems, not knowing what is or isn’t included from various individual volumes, there were a fair share of poems that caught my interest for their imagistic quality.

In general, I would say that Tranströmer’s poems present vivid scenes and build towards a powerful closing final line that revises the rest of the piece. An exemplary poem in that regard is “Weather Picture,” which reads as follows:

The October sea glistens coldly
with its dorsal fin of mirages.

Nothing is left that remembers
the white dizziness of yacht races.

An amber glow over the village.
And all sounds in slow flight.

A dog’s barking is a hieroglyph
painted in the air above the garden

where the yellow fruits outwits
the tree and drops of its own accord. (29)

The opening lines of the poem offer a strangely beautiful image, haunting in its way, of the sea glistening “with its dorsal fin of mirages.” Despite John Ashbery’s “Alcove” deriding poems about the “mugwump” of changing, I can’t help but feel that the closing down of a season is beautifully depicted here, the fading of yacht races and the “slow flight” of sounds. The dog’s bark is so old it is a “hieroglyph / painted in the air above the garden.” What a great line. The strange conclusion of the poem implies an agency of defiance, fruit jumping ahead of its schedule. Stunning.

Tranströmer’s poems vary in length. There are several haiku sequences throughout the collection, which have a simple elegance. One of my favourites deploys a shadow-stitching metaphor, which I find oddly resonant elsewhere and here: “Stag in blazing sun. / The flies sew, sew, fasten that / shadow to the ground” (“Haiku” 223). On the other side, there are longer poems like “In the Open” that really develop its ideas and flesh them out. “In the Open” begins with a “Late autumn labyrinth” (93), an evocative image—a poet of the seasons. He elaborates as follows: “At the entrance to the wood a discarded empty bottle. / Go in. At this season the woods are silent deserted halls. / Only a few kinds of noise: as if someone were cautiously removing twigs // with tweezers / or a hinge creaking faintly inside a thick tree trunk” (93). The descriptiveness of the writing really helps to paint the scene where “The frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they have shriveled” (93). At that point, we take a detour and Tranströmer fleshes out the mushrooms as: “like objects and garments found after a disappearance” (93). The poem takes a turn from there and has a faintly haunting quality: “Now twilight comes. It’s a matter of getting out / and seeing your landmarks again: the rusty implement in the field / and the house on the other side of the lake, a russet square strong as a / bouillon cube” (93). The poem gets subdivided further and the second part gets into a more lyric, personal mode: “A letter from America set me off, drove me out / one light night in June on the empty streets in the suburb / among newborn blocks without memory, cool as blueprints” (93). The narrative continues where the speaker has a letter in his pocket with “desperate furious striding, it is a kind of pleading” (93). The stanza ends with a strange couplet, setting up an opposition: “With you, evil and good really have faces. / With us, it’s mostly a struggle between roots, ciphers, and shades of light” (93). I love that blend of “roots, ciphers, and shades of light” in particular, as they all compete for a defined existence. Tranströmer’s poem continues on with some generalities that are, as the title of the collection might imply, enigmatic: “Those who run death’s errands don’t avoid the daylight. / They rule from glass stories. They swarm in the sun’s blaze. / They lean across the counter and turn their head” (93). The poet stops “before one of the new facades” (93). The juxtaposition of “glass stories” (think: skyscraper) with the woodland imagery from the first part extends into “Many windows all merging together into one single window” (93) and “The light of the night sky is caught there with the gliding of the treetops. / It is a mirroring sea without waves, erect in the summer night” (93). The section, like many of the poems, ends with a powerful couplet that grants the scene something deeper: “Violence seems unreal / for a little” (93).

As you may have noticed, Tranströmer’s work is replete with nature-oriented imagery and stands out as a real highlight. In “The Journey’s Formulae,” Tranströmer describes “Four oxen [that] come, under the sky. / Nothing proud about them. And the dust thick / As wool. The insects’ pens scrape” (41). You can imagine the scrabble of insects, or what I’ve described in a poem as “summer’s buzzsaw.” The poem continues with “A swirl of horses, lean as in / grey allegories of the plague. / Nothing gentle about them. And the sun raves”(41). Later in the poem, a grim mood dominates: “An old house has shot itself in the forehead” (42). What a darkly connoted phrase. Meanwhile “Two boys kick a ball in the twilight. / A swarm of rapid echoes. — Suddenly, starlight” (42). It presents itself as a kind of twisted pastoral that offers enough intrigue to sustain the poem. The poem also makes use of recurring motifs: insects and their sounds, darkness, pathways. He continues, “On the road in the long darkness” (42). The speaker is inserted more thoroughly into the narrative vision of the poem: “My wristwatch / gleams obstinately with time’s imprisoned insect” (42). The ticking. The scratching. Love it. The poem continues, “The quiet in the crowded compartment is dense. / In the darkness the meadows stream past. // But the writer is halfway into his image, there / he travels, at the same time eagle and mole” (42). For me, a few things come to mind. I think about the scene in The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford when the fields are rendered impressionistic. I also think about the Künstlerroman genre exemplified in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Derek Walcott’s poem “Prelude” as the writer finds himself. It’s an apt description where the writer sees all as if from above (the “eagle”) and burrows deep down for truth (the “mole”). The longer I savour the poems, the better they feel.

Other poems pick up on the thread of becoming a writer. In “Lament,” for example, Tranströmer writes the following about the challenges of being a writer:

He laid aside his pen.
It rests still on the table.
It rests still in the empty room.
He laid aside his pen.

Too much that can neither be written nor kept silent!
He is paralyzed by something happening far away
although the wonderful traveling bag throbs like a heart. (64)

The poem seeks the secret messages in the world that become the fuel for poetry:

Outside it is early summer.
Whistlings from the greenery—men or birds?
And cherry trees in bloom embrace the trucks that have come home. (64)

The best part of the poem, in my view, are again the closing lines: “Weeks go by. / Night comes slowly. / The moths settle on the windowpane: / small pale telegrams from the world” (64). I adore the idea of moths being “small pale telegrams” sending messages. Beautiful.

In “Baltics,” there’s a similar kind of grappling with the writing process. The poem is lengthy and diaristic, dated with various kinds of milestone moments. In one section, the subject “wrote music to texts he no longer understood— / in the same way / we express something through our lives / in the humming chorus full of mistaken words” (136). The poem revolves around death and “the death-lectures went on for several terms” and the speaker “attended / together with people [he] didn’t know,” meeting and departing in their own ways, erasing into “profiles” (136). Despite the nature-heavy focus in the poems, there’s a real human core to them. The speaker “looked at the sky and at the earth and straight ahead / and since then [he’s] been writing a long letter to the dead / on a typewriter with no ribbon just a horizon line / so the words knock in vain and nothing sticks” (136). First of all, I really like the idea of a typewriter not having a ribbon “just a horizon line.” The poem continues with a hesitation: “I pause with my hand on the door handle, take the pulse of the house” (136). That personification resonates beautifully. From there, the poem gets a little more obscure and more medieval and there’s discussion of escargot and a snail “almost motionless in the grass, the antennae are sucked in / and rolled out, disturbances and hesitation” (136)—and in that, the speaker identifies himself.

Let’s go back to houses. In “A Winter’s Night,” Tranströmer describes a house in a storm: “The storm puts its mouth to the house / and blows to produce a note” (68). The transformation of a storm into a song is pretty compelling, but the speaker “sleep[s] uneasily, turn[s], with shut eyes / read[ing] the storm’s text” (68). The poem goes on with a child’s “eyes [...] large in the dark” and “for the child the storm howls” (68). There’s a kind of symbiosis between the storm, an interplay. Both the child and storm are “fond of lamps that swing. / Both are halfway toward speech” (68). Meanwhile, “the house fleets its own constellation of nails / holding the walls together” (68). Everything is teetering on collapse. Again, the poem takes a dark turn, calmness never quite still: “The night is calm over our floor / (where all expired footsteps / rest like sunk leaves in a pond) / but outside the night is wild” (68). The idea of footsteps resting like sunk leaves gives a chilling kind of tone. Meanwhile, “over the world goes a graver storm. / It sets its mouth to our soul / and blows to produce a note. We dread / the storm will blow us empty” (68). We’re at an intersection of music and terror here.

I’ll offer commentary on one last poem, “After Someone’s Death.” It’s a cosmic opening: “Once there was a shock / that left behind a long pale glimmering comet’s tail” (85). In that comet’s tail, “It contains us. It blurs TV images. / It deposits itself as cold drops on the aerials” (85). Tranströmer has a knack for leaves and words: “You can still shuffle along on skis in the winter sun / among groves where last year’s leaves still hang” (85) but moreover “They are like pages torn from old telephone directories— / the names are eaten up by the cold” (85). Wow. Then we delve into the classic trope of appearances not measuring up to reality: “It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing. / But often the shadow feels more real than the body. / The samurai looks insignificant / beside his armor of black dragon scales” (85). This is one instance where I actually favour the penultimate couplet to the concluding ones. I like the juxtaposition of how beautiful it is to feel your heart throbbing and how the shadow feels more real than the body. It’s a gorgeous turn.

The Great Enigma holds one final surprise, though. Following all of the poems, there are some excerpts from Tranströmer’s prose memoir, Memories Look at Me. The prose is just as lush and poetic as the poems. It reads elegantly and offers itself as an enticing preview of the memoir. I know very little about the poet’s life. The excerpts provided are about his youth and his early interest in Africa and lepidoptery (I wonder if he was friends with Nabokov, or if they would’ve been friends). I’ll have to read more sometime.

Happy reading!

Two Bowls of Milk by Stephanie Bolster

  I invite you to share in a memory of mine from my younger years. I’m in Verona at an art gallery, carrying a notebook in which I write fragments of poems and miscellany thoughts. After milling about for a few hours, I find my way into the modern art section, and come across a striking painting of a man with what I remember as a bloodied eye, looking anguished. The painting arrests me. When I look at the title, it is Waiting for Godot—a play with a similarly arresting power. I sit down on the floor of the gallery, examining the painting from a safe distance and writing in my notebook while Italian security guards snicker at this strange, floored, Canadian. There’s me: writing a poem in response to a painting in response to a play.

I mention the anecdote because poetry-ifying visual arts was one of my main tactics as a budding writer and in Stephanie Bolster’s Two Bowls of Milk, we see the practice playing out by a similar, albeit more capable hand. Two Bowls of Milk is a collection of poetry that, like many collections, comes in multiple parts. The first section of the collection is more rooted in experience, particularly rural experiences, while the back half of the collection is in direct response to artworks, which are cited under the titles of poems. 

Bolster maintains a lush descriptiveness that feels philosophically resonant, exploring the idea of perspective. She starts early with untitled the poem opening the section “Come to the Edge”, in which she invites the reader: “Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there, / you see things defining themselves, the hoofprints left by sheep, / the slope of the roof, each feather against each feather on each goose. / You see the stake with the flap of orange plastic that marks // the beginning of real” (3). I appreciate this early invitation from the haze into something more defined, and the positioning of realness as the precise details. Important to note is that the things define “themselves,” giving agency to the inanimate. The poem continues with a rationale for the reality”: “I’m showing you this because / I’m suck of the way you clutch the darkness with your hands, / seek invisible fenceposts for guidance, accost spectres” (3). The poem has a grounding effect in the material rather than the abstract, while still providing that hint of a sort of “great beyond” of inspiration. It makes me think of an engraving I once saw of someone, bent over, looking “beyond the veil,” which to me looked like someone awaiting the sting of the guillotine. This trip into the real is not without its need for caution, as the poem’s speaker notes: “I’m coming with you because I fear you’ll trip // over the string that marks the beginning, you’ll lie across the border / and with that view — fields of intricate grain and chiselled mountains, / cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm—you’ll forget your feet, / numb in straw and indefinite dung, and be unable to rise, to walk farther” (3). There guide has a gentleness that I quite appreciate, noting the danger but offering the guidance to avoid it. The poem weaves together the philosophical project: bringing the abstract into realness while also maintaining the allusiveness to something more significant and resonant. The poem ends with the following stanzas:

My fingers weave so close between yours because I’ve been there
before, I know the relief of everything, how it eases the mind to learn
shapes it hasn’t made, how it eases the feet to know the ground
will persist. See those two bowls of milk, just there,

on the other side of the property line, they’re for the cats
that sometimes cross over and are seized by a thirst, they’re
to wash your hands in. Lick each finger afterwards. That will be
your first taste, and my finger tracing your lips will be the second. (3)

There’s a suggestiveness in the final lines, pairing this idea of revealing the real with a charged intimacy. What I like best, though, is the line about “how it eases the mind to learn / shapes it hasn’t made” (3). I feel as though that’s critical to Bolster’s project here. There’s an attentiveness to the details, a commitment to learning things that did not originate with us. I once wrote an essay about the ethics of attention posited in the short works of Samuel Beckett—funny how that motif returns to me again.

With this kind of care and attention, Bolster offers some short reflections on “Assorted Flora” and about the “Iris,” she writes,

Your spine is a secret grief.

Rooted in inconstant mud,
you managed to stand, proud

though purple marks the perfect
white of your throat.

But cut, left
alone in a vase, you will lean

away from light, shrink
into your crippled shadow. (8)

The imagistic nature of the work draws on the specific details of the flower and elevates it, though I’m not sure elevates is the right word—humanizes might be more a propos. The personification of the iris with “the perfect / white of [its] throat” and the idea of shrinking away into a shadow, away from the light, gives the flower a human quality. It’s a charming observational moment of identification.

The imagistic nature of the poems reminds me of William Carlos Williams, particularly in this section of “Poems For the Flood,” a poem that is comprised of several vignettes:

Watering the garden, I call the earth thirsty
and then cringe at what I’ve said. The way things are

is simpler and more difficult to understand. My throat
and the columbines open for the same water differently.

Closed rose petals, a sky not scrawled with cloud,
the small of the back, these are lesser. Beauty is the red

rectangle of a barn surrounded by flood.
The white chicken on the rooftop testing its wings. (17)

Maybe it’s the white chickens and the redness of the barn. I appreciate what Bolster adds to the imagery by having the connections between humans and plants: “My throat / and the columbines open for the same water differently.” 

The back half of the collection is focused on responding to artworks. One poem that stands out to me in that regard is “Still Life With Braid,” which is given the subtitle for the artwork “Female Dissected Body, Seen From the Back, Gerard de Lairess, 1685. Engraving with etching.” The poem has a more narrative-driven impulse, introducing a kind of relationship between two characters: “I loved her when we washed our hands / in matching sinks at school” (55). The specificity of the moment stands out to me and then it continues with an excellent set of lines: “She feared the cubicles / where a raincoat with a man in it might stand / on a toilet’s rim awaiting us, pocket knife // tight in his fist” (55). The ominousness of the moment is finely delivered. I think what I like best is the way the line “She feared the cubicles” is given a line break that creates meaning on its own but then is doubled up with the lines which follow. The poem continues with the disappearance of the girl with the teacher reassuring the speaker that she’s just camping. Finally, the central character’s “letter slot released / a drawing of an iris, pencilled throat open, bulb / engorged beneath” (55). She continues, “Veins so intricately etched / they stung the purple in my wrists. No hand but hers // had done it” (55). The narrator flashes forward where “Time passed / until [she] visited a gallery and ticking stopped / before her adult portrait: wrists resplendent, raw / in bracelets of taut rope” (55). The narrator sees her childhood friend’s gestures replicated in the image where her posture “peeled to reveal her braided spine” (55). The final description is such a haunting one that reminds me of a philosophy book I read about the female form last year:

skin draped

her waist, was pinned aside like coy sleeves fitted
to her upper arms. The alphabet named her

crucial points but not that curl she’d tucked
behind her ear at eight. Her face averted, ashamed
at believing its body worth this spectacle of death.
Why did I not tell her she was more than this? I am

no more myself: bones pitched inside a tent of skin;
fear; one bound hand and the other binding. (55-56)

The description is so rich and evocative of their bond and seems to tell a story in just a few short, rich sentences. There’s a notion of what is invisible to others re-emerging, or at least being perceived, seemingly by nobody else. It’s a fantastic conclusion to an entire story, told within two pages.

Of course, the challenge of a collection like this is that, sometimes, without the reference images, the poems don’t really land in the same way. The challenge of responding to art with another art form is that you’re both adding and subtracting at once. You’re adding a layer of interpretation, but potentially subtracting from your own work by relying on your references. It’s a fine line to walk that has the potential to make your work shine but also to limit your audience. At the very least it places some demands on the reader to conduct additional research.

Overall, I quite liked Two Bowls of Milk. It had a lot of great poetry in it, which sounds like an odd thing to say, although I do think it encapsulates the spirit of perception that gives poetry its ethical and aesthetic force.

Happy reading!