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!

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

    

        Oh no. I’m going to have to reread In Search of Lost Time, aren’t I?

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton is an interesting nonfiction project, bordering between biography, self-help, and literary criticism. Some of its key topics are creativity, perception, suffering, and wellness, and I have to say, if not entirely practicable, it’s an entertaining read.

Part of what makes the book so entertaining is Botton’s tone. While his work is informative, the selection and presentation of details is outright funny. For instance, Botton explains how Proust took a job at a library and eventually got fired after five years, since he ultimately only worked about one day a year. The way Botton presents the detail is just a fun pithy approach. Similarly, I couldn’t help but laugh when reading about reviews of Proust’s work. When he started writing In Search of Lost Time, he sent it to friends and publishers and Botton quotes peoples’ indifference and rage comically. One publisher was incensed by a sentence that went on for forty-four lines of text. At least a few complained that after four hundred pages, they had no idea where the book was going (and it’s implied that Proust didn’t either.) One of Proust’s friends sent a letter praising the book for its excellence, and how she continually re-read the passage about his first communion—a part that didn’t exist. Botton also notes the cultural legacy of Proust via a contest that Monty Python hosted where people needed to summarize In Search of Lost Time in fifteen seconds while wearing a bathing suit. I like embracing the absurdity of Proust’s project like that.

It’s not all laughs, of course. Proust dealt with some pretty significant health issues (of which many were skeptical), for instance. Botton outlines Proust’s diet, sleep habits, and digestive problems, and about how his severe allergies limited his life. In a rare moment where Proust is critical of his mother, he says she likes to be his nurse and hates when he is well. Later, Botton outlines the factors leading up to Proust’s death, his refusal to take doctors’ orders, and implies that he essentially brought about his own death. It’s pretty dark.

Aside from the literary biography aspect of the work, the book is branded—even in its title—as a kind of self-help book. I wouldn’t say that the book entirely delivers on that promise. Early in the book, Botton provides an excellent breakdown for reasons for reading in general, using passages from Proust’s books and letters to support the benefits. That catalogue of reasons for reading is beautifully developed and Botton offers some personal commentary that I found touching as a literary work in its own right. He discusses how part of why we read is that we find parallels in our own lives. He talks about how In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator falls in love with Albertine and the narration draws parallels to other figures that he knew. Botton describes the various figures in his own life with whom he sees parallels in Proust’s characters. It’s refreshing to see someone’s personal connections on the page like that; it felt relatable in that respect.

Another section that really stood out to me is the commentary on Proust reading the news. At the time, there were news briefs that offered a quick account of an event. Proust came across one involving a murder and wrote a piece that linked it into a literary tradition, offering sympathy to its characters, and so on. He expanded on the sparse details and really paid close attention to its emotional core. The same principle existed in his letters; his mom pushed him to write more, annoyed that she received only the most cursory details of what time he slept, and so on. There’s an ethos of paying attention and of trying to find non-standard phrases to describe experience. In fact, Proust had a great disdain for bourgeois stock phrases that signalled culture. Instead, he was devoted to the particular and unique. Every rainstorm is different, for example. And all of this from expanding on newspaper details!

If the book delivers on its promise of How Proust Can Change Your Life, it is in this notion of paying attention to the particular. It comes to form a ethical stance towards life, to give nuance to every sensation. Botton returns to a similar idea in the final chapter of the book. He documents the number of people who try to visit key locales in In Search of Lost Time, like Combray or the shop that makes the madeleine that inspired Proust’s reminiscences. Heck, I went to Paris to finish reading In Search of Lost Time. To return to the point, Botton sees this practice as a peril: it is us trying to insert ourselves into books. We are trying to live out the experience of someone else, rather than let ourselves have experiences worth communicating. Botton notes that Proust inspires an ethics of attention where it is the “quality of vision” and not “the object of view.” It isn’t what we’re looking at that matters, it’s how we look at it.

Essentially, the book is a compelling case to be original, caring, perceptive, and responsive to others. I admit that it touched a place in my heart and pulled Proust back to the surface. There is so much humour and tenderness in Proust’s work, his biography, and Botton’s account narration that it makes a compelling case to return to Proust’s oeuvre and really give it the time it deserves.

Happy reading; happy living!

The Stubborn Particulars of Grace by Bronwen Wallace

        I had the good fortune of studying creative writing with Carolyn Smart when I was an undergraduate student at Queen’s and it was she that introduced the name Bronwen Wallace, with whom she was friends, into my frame of reference. That, however, was over a decade ago. Reading goes slowly, you see, and so I never made it to any of Wallace’s work until now.

The Stubborn Particulars of Grace is a collection of poems that veers towards confession, eulogy, and activism. The whole collection reads as incantatory and dedicatory in nature, with poems for specific people. It recalled to me some of the advice in Anne Lamott’s book Bird By Bird, where she discussed how her best writing begins as a gift to someone. Wallace embodies that: these poems feel like gifts, sometimes to a fault—the gifts needs to be broad enough to be stolen by others. In any case, the collection is deeply personal, but also has an outward focus towards social causes and community-building. To that end, the conflicted tenderness in the treatment of inmates at Kingston Penitentiary really shone.

In terms of style, Wallace’s individual lines aren’t as flowery, ornate, or challenging as you might expect from modern poets. Her style is direct and straightforward, almost as if her poems are more like short stories than densely packed constellations. The style has its pros and cons; the poems don’t really grip me with their language, but the length of the poems offer some great opportunities for circling back to a core motif or playing with juxtaposition in interesting ways. The unlikely connections and associated meanderings were the most engaging pieces.

There are five poems in particular that stood out to me that I’d like to offer some commentary on here: “One of the Things I Did Back Then”, “Gifts”, “Joseph MacLeod Daffodils”, ”Testimonies”, and “Neighbours”.

In “One of the Things I Did Back Then,” the opening stanza is focused on deeply personal involuntary memories. In describing summer, Wallace writes that the smell of summer “isn’t roses or freshly mown grass” but is instead the “hot-baked dusty steam / that rises from the pavement / just after the street cleaner’s gone, gritty / and warm as any memory worth the work.” She then proceeds to jump between connected memories, smelling decaying newspapers in the library and reading through birth and death announcements. It’s a morbid scene where the speaker writes down a list of the names of children who died in infancy for someone else. The narrative builds a mysterious premise as the narrator speculates on where this man might be and then the second stanza takes a surprising turn: “When he deserts, / his real name becomes a skin / he has to shuck, so he can wear / the one I’ll give him, a dead child’s, / that allows him a birth certificate, / a social insurance number, a chance.” In a short vignette, Wallace builds a life, presumably for a draft dodger or a Vietnam veteran, because the next stage recounts watching movies of young men getting pushed from helicopters and children bursting into flames and “a war coming at me, not from the TV / but through my own front door, born from hands / that dried dishes or made soup.” To her credit, Wallace builds the milieu and fills it with real, flesh-out characters with a great deal of economy. The speaker of the poem confesses to feeling conflicted and the ethical dilemma of the piece comes across with such confessional beauty it’s hard not to be engrossed by it. She notes, “Mostly I see what I did back then / as a way I had to help them, / but sometimes I think about the parents / of the babies whose names I stole, how they’d feel / if they knew and whether it was a kind of violation.” She describes the excitement of finding a new identity “like winning a lottery, / and how the names, the two dates / made the cards I used look a little like tombstones.” I find the juxtaposition of light and dark in the poem plays beautifully—tragic, but beautifully. The end reflections demonstrate introspection as personal as universal in its implications:

Here, we know only too well
the chances a name offers
or denies. The difference it can make,
like the bit of luck or the casual decisions
that add up to a lifetime.

Here, I know, too, that the war
I thought I had a tiny part in stopping
merely shifted location and goes on
as planned.

She finds the universal core of the experience to share before ending the poem with a personal reflection on her own birth announcement and passing into history to do her part. I feel like the poem “One of the Things I Did Back Then” serves as an excellent reference point for Wallace’s ability to navigate the personal, political, and universal effectively.

Her poem “Gifts,” appropriately so named, given the nature of the book, begins again with a deeply personal moment: “Right now, my son is crying / because the T-shirt be bought me for my birthday / is a bit too small.” Even beginning the poem with those two words, “right now” gives the poem an immediacy and grounds it in “reality” (or as close to it as text can come). Her son’s sobs are described as “stubborn intervals / that try to force a song apart,” which is such a wonderfully poignant phrase. From there, the poem becomes somewhat list-like in the reasons that Wallace would still wear the shirt: “it’s not that small” and “because of the Mickey Mouse decal” and how it is personalized with her name, and he saved up, and she’s his mom, and so on. The sentiment her son feels I find relatable: you know the gift isn’t perfect and it’s devastating: “He can see for himself how it wrinkles / under the armpits and clings / to my shoulder-blades.” The feeling is compared to that of an argument where “words we let fly [...] [are] dry birds, in some empty room of the brain” — another great image to ground the experience. The poem then delves into memory of watching him grow and become a man and find his place in a masculine world and that disconnect that forms noticeably, suddenly.

As I mentioned before, the length of the poem allows Wallace to explore a motif and forge unlikely connections, which may be best represented by her poem “Joseph MacLeod Daffodils.” The poem starts with dialogue where someone tells the speaker that she’s planting perennials because she’s scared and says, “because I’m scared and it’s the only way I know / to tell myself I’m going to be here, / years from now,  watching them come up.” There’s some meditation on what kind of milestones can be marked by the growth of plants—“when Jeremy / is old enough to drive, I’ll have to divide these, / put some under the cedars there; by the time / he leaves home, they’ll be thick as grass.” There’s then an extended discussion that offers a view to the intimacy between the characters, hovering around the idea of death and staring down the inevitability of it. As the two share ideas back and forth, the speaker shares knowledge that there are yellow daffodils called Joseph MacLeods, and that the way “they got their name / was that the man who developed them / always kept a radio on in the greenhouse / and the day the first one bloomed, in 1942, / was the day he got the news / of the Allied victory, against Rommel, / at el Alamein, and the announcer who read the news / was Joseph MacLeod.” She says it’s a “sense of history” that she can appreciate: “no El Alamein Glorias or / Allied Victory Blooms for this guy, you can be sure. / It’s like the story my mother always tells / about joining the crowds on V-E day, swollen with me, / but dancing all night, thinking now / she can be born any time.” The conversation shifts over to another long stanza that discusses Diane Arbus and cancer and divorce and the existential dread being spread out between them. There’s a direct address to the interlocutor in the final stanza: “It’s what I love in you, Isabel. / How you can stand here saying / ‘Brave and kind. I want to get through this / being brave and kind.’” By the time the last stanza arrives, several of the key motifs return and the way the flowers and Joseph MacLeod and their shared love of quotations serve as touchstones that enhance the themes of the poem with a final observation that the more a secret tells you, “the less you know,” offering this enigmatic note to end on, with questions about mortality and immortalization hovering just above.

The poem “Testimonies” is a compelling, fraught work that meditates on language. It praises an old woman’s voice that serves as a guide for “her people.” The poem is seemingly focused on an Indigenous experience from the outside as people strive to document languages: “the long hours / taping these languages which only a few / of the elders speak now.” It’s a poem about sharing stories, but also about having to “create the alphabet / that takes them there.” The poem then becomes an extended metaphor of map-making and language-making as co-extensive. There’s a beautiful anecdote about a parrot in the Northwest Territories that lived for sixty years after being brought over and how it sung songs in a cockney accent, “the voice of a dead miner / kept on in a brain the size of an acorn.” There’s a compelling moment where “all countries of his lifetime, contracted / to its bright, improbably presence / amid men who figure they’ve seen / just about everything now.” There’s a compelling contraction of space and language that nonetheless retains a connection to the outside, a thread to follow to something bigger. Again, the juxtaposition in the poem plays well. There’s this small link to the past through the parrot, and then it’s expressed again from another angle with shards of pottery popping up in layers of earth, then shifts to a meditation on how we slow down to look at car crashes and scan the wreckage, “blessed by our terrible need to know everything.” Further, there’s a man who ploughs a skull up in his cornfield that long goes unclaimed. Then, there’s a comment on the fields being enriched by deposits of a glacier. The whole poem is snapshots of the past that linger: “the trunk of old clothes / or the chair that didn’t make it / to the load on back of the truck” and “those smaller choices / we all have to make / about the future / and what can be wisely carried into it.” If there is one poem in the collection that is a masterpiece, it is this one. Everything is finely wrought and cohesive.

Finally, I’ll make a brief comment on “Neighbours,” which has lush imagery and comments on the idea of perspective. It notes that “insects see / as ultraviolet, a luminescent landscape / we can’t use, though the city / rises from it, scared and hopeful, / like a friend I haven’t seen in years.” The fact that this passage about perspective and invisibility emerges within a poem about inmates is a brilliant turn. Again, the juxtaposition really works. Insects see invisible worlds that we don’t, and prisoners are literally removed from our sight. It’s an exercise of imagination, of perception-based empathy, even for people who have done reprehensible things—a challenge Wallace doesn’t shy away from.

This idea of perception is critical to The Stubborn Particulars of Grace, and it’s a book that gets better when you look at it more closely. When you start to see the connections between the different components of the poems, you see a finely woven tapestry emerge. While the poems sometimes seem more personal than accessible, there’s nonetheless a kind of universality that shines through and provides some wonderful intimacy. The language on its own isn’t ornate enough to warrant quoting isolated lines, but the storylines of the poems, their meditative empathy, their calls to action, and their weaving are well worth sustained attention.

Happy reading, everybody!