Gaspereau Press, 2020
The first section
of Annick MacAskill’s Murmurations opens
with an epigraph from Vis-à-Vis: Field
Notes on Poetry and Wilderness, a trio of essays by Don McKay on poetry,
language, and the natural world. MacAskill draws from a passage in which McKay describes
the “vertigo” felt when the profundity of a being or thing evades attempts to
make such an encounter intelligible through language. “As with tools,” MacAskill
quotes from McKay, “it is often during such momentary breakdowns that we sense
the enormous, unnameable wilderness beyond it—a wilderness we both long for and
fear.” If opening a poetry collection with a passage on the trepidation and
desire felt toward the ineffable implies the ensuing poems have something to
say about linguistic terra incognita,
it’s a mantle which MacAskill doesn’t shirk. The poems in Murmurations create a feeling of “at ease” with alterity, yet never
to impinge on wilderness, if such an imposition were possible. In tracing how,
and to what effect, these poems capture my attention, I marvel at how the poems
consistently skirt the uncanny, that eerie mix of familiarity and strangeness, to
trace what could be called intimacy with uncertainty. I marvel, in short, at how
the poems shape sound and image in ways that respect and enrich the differences
that make intimacy of all kinds meaningful.
“Ornithologists”
is an early sonnet in Murmurations
that exhibits a subtlety that does so much to create a sense of equanimity with
the unfamiliar. There’s irony in the title, since much of the poem catalogues a
novice birdwatcher’s difficulty with cultivating the saint-like patience and
knack for detail that birding requires. MacAskill creates a colloquial, down-to-earth
rhythm through lines that hide prepositions, bury verb phrases, and enjamb to
delay syntactic fulfilment: “I know geese for their resilience, ducks // their
footle—robins and jays shining / against all backdrops.” Casual and
unpretentious, MacAskill’s phrasing and honest portrayal of uncertainty wins
this reader’s sympathy and understanding. Indeed, “crows look just like ravens
/ and ravens exactly like crows,” especially from a distance. But it’s not the
way the phrasing pairs with the speaker’s tally of avian data that makes this
poem such a memorable depiction of being “at ease” with the unfamiliar. It is
in the poem’s concluding lines where MacAskill apostrophizes that the poem transforms
from a first-person account of birding to a tribute of getting to know another
person through birding. The final
line of the penultimate tercet, “And over lunch that day,” leads into the
poem’s final tercet:
you
pointed out the window to what you said was a falcon,
or
hawk. I would have given anything to understand.
At
that time, I just nodded, like I knew what you were saying.
In admitting that she “would have given anything to
understand,” the speaker states her ignorance of what birdwatching means for
her companion; this revelation hinges on MacAskill’s decision to leave the
imperative “to understand” stranded without an object that might refer to the
sighted bird. In making such an admission, the speaker bares her desire to be
closer to the unnamed “you.” And with the poem’s final line revealing a time between
the events described and their voicing (“At
that time, I just nodded, like I knew what you were saying”), MacAskill suggests
that the speaker in the lyric present has come to better understand the
significance of birding for her companion and thereby has grown closer to this other
person. I relish in how MacAskill delays divulging why the speaker has taken up
the task of birding (“learning / the determination I have shunned since
child”), then, as is the case in all good sonnets, discloses a resolution at
once deeply satisfying yet not necessarily representing interpretive closure.
In a poem so concerned with making knowledge tangible, it is notable that the
reader isn’t given any way of knowing what the meaning of birdwatching is for
the companion. Withholding this meaning is what makes this poem a memorable
encapsulation of the unfolding of personalities that occurs in relationships of
all sorts. Why? Because the withholding creates a felt absence for readers which
resembles in its ambiguity the inscrutability of other people, what makes
getting to know another person a tenuous yet theoretically inexhaustible process.
It’s thanks to grammatical deletions and evasions that MacAskill makes this
beautiful facet about intimacy seemingly palpable.
If you Google
“Murmuration,” you will find images and videos of skies dotted with thousands
of starlings flying in what seems like a coordinated or predetermined fashion.
If you watch a video of these starlings, you will glimpse formations briefly transform
into a shape, perhaps a recognizable one, before seamlessly stretching, folding,
twisting, or condensing into another. It would be right to say that in tracking
the effects of MacAskill’s poetry one can perceive sound, imagery, and other
elements in a similar choreographed state of movement. But I find the persistent
softness to her voice a greater point of comparison. Unlike a murmur, a sound petering
out into silence or unintelligibility, MacAskill’s voice is like the edge of a
murmuration in daylight – soft, rounded, yet entirely distinct in how it takes
shape. In “Oath (Lauds),” MacAskill creates this unique edge by balancing vivid
description with a change in register. In this first strophe describing a dream
alight with birds, note the amount of detail MacAskill packs into two
sentences:
I
didn’t dream of you last night,
but
I dreamt of starlings, gasoline-coloured,
staggered
on branches of trees,
stripped
by winter. The sky
was
blue-black, and the flock sang, fat,
scattered
like Christmas lights, the warbles
too
faint for me to hear, but everything shaking
with
their notes, tenebrous and stubborn.
The first strophe comes across as descriptive, at the
very least un-tenebrous, because adjectives are fittingly paired with nouns
(“starlings, gasoline-coloured”) and the sole simile strikes a pleasing mix of
surprise and recognition. Enjambment following nouns and verbs additionally
slows down the reading experience, forming short breaks that imitate the pauses
and hesitations that occur as we struggle to recall a dream. Now compare the
effects of the first strophe to those of the second:
My
phone rests silent. Last night
you
asked me through the laptop screen
to
stay up with you. Tomorrow
tomorrow, the promise quiet
but
still ringing in my ear.
It might be said that the lack of detail and
figurative language in the second strophe causes this poem to do exactly what I
just said MacAskill’s voice doesn’t do – that is, end like a murmur. I don’t
believe I am being too charitable in saying that the contrast between the
strophes is too noticeable for such criticism to be merited. By following a
strophe replete with detail with one exhibiting an obvious dearth of such
quality, MacAskill asks her language to perform more with less. The word with
the most syllables in the second strophe (“Tomorrow”)
is part of an enjambed sentence and repeated, which recalls in its recurrence a
drawn-out petition often found in prayer. “Promise,” paired with the sole
adjective in the strophe (“quiet”), additionally relates the strophe with prayer’s
hushed supplication. Here I reach the limit of my understanding with “Oath
(Lauds),” however. MacAskill counters a dearth of detail in the poem’s final
strophe by aligning its language with that of morning prayers in Catholicism, yet
the entire poem is affected by ambiguity present in the final lines: “the
promise quiet, / but still ringing in my ear.” Is the quiet promise to stay awake
with the unnamed “you” ringing in the speaker’s ear a pleasant reminder? Or is
it one of those promises murmured because it’s given begrudgingly? Leaning on
the positive connotations of “quiet,” I’m inclined to think the ringing is
pleasant. There are things, however, that might serve as an oneiric indication
of the opposite. There’s an unsettling image of the “blue-black sky” (is this a
murmuration? a bruised horizon? a vision from Hitchcock?), a surreal image in
the faint sound of warbles shaking “everything,” and portentous words like
“stubborn,” to name a few possible indicators. I don’t linger at length on
these final lines to pose them as an obstacle to appreciation, nor to dress
their ambiguity in a virtue commensurable with the alterity MacAskill handles
adroitly throughout her collection. The ambiguity in the final lines is rare
because it is so localized and limited to a few possibilities, thwarting a
decisive ending to the poem, yes, but also reminding us that poetry, contrary
to the way we sometimes talk about it, is an art guided by feeling, impression,
instinct. In saying that readers will intuitively come to their own understanding
about the emotional significance of the ringing, I have seldom felt so
supported by the poetry.
Often
when rereading a poem to determine how it captured my attention, I find myself drawn
to how MacAskill enacts transformations by leveraging the powers of sound. In “May
6,” a poem describing a birthday held on Alberta’s Bow River, the two-letter
preposition “of” appears in eleven of the poem’s sixteen lines. I quote the
first three couplets to give a sense of what MacAskill accomplishes by
threading the preposition through her poem:
Birthday
at Bow River: the water sea glass
beneath
the threat of clouds
sunk
below the neglect of their houses.
An
imperative of crows emerges
from
the pines in a whirl of black arrows,
and
the broad paintbrushes of magpie wings
Reading even just this excerpt of the poem aloud, one
cannot help but perceive the preposition’s phonemes recurrently paired, the
vowel articulated in the back of the mouth moving into the consonant
articulated in the front of the mouth. The preposition sonically resonates
throughout the poem, expressing interrelations on the eponymous dates and
imparting a sense of unity to its occasion, the birthday. All the things
described, in other words, are made part of
the experience of the birthday by the inclusive call of the preposition. This
sort of subtle handling of sound is characteristic of Murmurations, especially in poems where the sonic valence of words
relates to the avian world. In one poem, for instance, MacAskill’s clipped
assonatal language resembles the pained cries of a lonely bird: “I, too,
call—failing, I call and I call.” In another poem called “Pigeon,” gaps which
substitute punctuation and prolong each line recall the drawn-out, discontinuous
cooing of the city dweller:
the
rock dove’s clotted call
a
song thickened
like
peanut butter in her throat
sotto voce on burnt toast
[…]
brings me back
my head on your breastbone
your heartbeat
thrum
And then there are poems like “Ketch Harbour” that I
linger on simply for their euphony. Try reading these lines aloud: “Post rain
the water spills like silk, calm / like it’s everyone’s day off, but just /
Friday, our secret slip into the future.” The sibilance in the poem’s opening
lines recurs like a thread stitched into fabric, appearing in the alliterative
“spills like silk” and fricative-heavy “Friday,” then again in the alliterative
“secret slip” and fricative “future.” It’s exciting to read a poet so concerned
with the sonic architecture of her poetry, one who values meaning and its
precarious emergence from ordinary, undifferentiated sound.
Many of
the poems in Murmurations resonate
with amor de longh, or love of what
is subject to distance, a theme developed by late medieval Tuscan and Provençal
troubadours in the context of the Crusades. There isn’t enough space here to
properly summarize the tradition, so let me just say these poems (or songs, as
they would’ve been called) frequently took as their subject the experience of falling
in love and the painful realization that distance has made its fulfilment
impossible. These poems helped to cultivate a vision of romantic love in which
the male lover loves not the transient, flesh-and-blood reality of the beloved
woman, but the emotional turbulence created by the distance between them. In
most cases, this distance is made to feel more like a prohibition than a
physical situation. (It could also be argued that an inherited version of this
vison has led many to suspect the pledges and claims of all love poetry,
especially when they are declared by a straight male.) Although she’s not
referring to amor de longh here specifically,
the remarks on love poetry and representation that MacAskill recently gave in
an interview are pertinent to this discussion:
For women writers,
for queer writers, there is something inherently subversive about laying claim
to our love and our desires, and there’s still a newness to this terrain—the
task is not just to insert ourselves, but to redefine the relationship between
lover and beloved, and even love itself.[1]
For a queer woman like MacAskill, to write poems involving
a distant lover or about a long-distance relationship is to rectify the
shortage of female perspectives and virtual absence of queer identities within the
amor de longh tradition. This writing
is subversive because it counters the tradition’s default heteronormativity, but
it doesn’t necessarily ensure that a paradigm in which the beloved becomes an
abstraction or a means of indulging fantasy will change or fall away. There’s
no guarantee, in other words, that the inclusion of historically sidelined actors
will change the roles performed. To really make a meaningful intervention into
the amor de longh tradition would
mean unapologetically laying claim to love without overindulging the feeling at
the expense of the beloved.
There
are no techniques at a poet’s disposal, at least of which I am aware, that
would insulate the love poet from the charge that she is overindulging her ego
and neglecting the addressed beloved. Since desire is too capacious an
experience to be represented in such a way that would be non-egotistical and
considerate for all readers, it would seem rash to say unequivocally that Murmurations makes a progressive
intervention into amor de longh. There’s
something of a wilderness behind a word like love; making unqualified statements
about its presence and quality in poetry may over- or underestimate how it is perceived
by others. Nevertheless, at the risk of simplification and overemphasis, I insist
that MacAskill avoids replicating a
vision of love in which distance makes the beloved metaphysically remote by
foregrounding the shared experience of being apart. If difficulty arises from this
revision of amor de longh, it’s where
an experience shared between the speaker and the beloved allows things to pass
unsaid. In “Neville Park,” for instance, reuniting with the addressed beloved
is said to be a “triumph” over the “months lost to distance, circumstance, /
our waiting shed in the vestibule next to days / of fliers, bills, salt clumped
/ on the welcome mat.” Something more concrete than “circumstance” here would shed
light on the measure of relief felt in the vestibule decorated with salty
detritus from Canada Post. But moments such as these, where something shared
between lover and beloved seems just slightly out of the reader’s grasp, are
rare in Murmurations. And perhaps in
a collection that frequently considers the limits of comprehension they
shouldn’t be considered missed opportunities, but instead moments where the
reader is encouraged to be “at ease” with the distance that to some extent
always enshrouds a relationship for those who aren’t a constitutive part.
MacAskill
succeeds in expressing a more progressive version of amor de longh mainly because the way she addresses desire and
physical distance never seems performed for the reader’s sake, which is way of
saying the poems have that quality of
being overheard. It’s the result of a honed candidness that neither romanticizes
nor downplays the distinct forms of vulnerability that occur in a long-term
relationship. It’s present even where MacAskill subjects amor de longh to levity, such as in “Monday,” where a cellphone is
ignored because its imagined contents (“emails from Nicole or advertisements
for Viagra”) would interrupt the speaker “count[ing] the minutes / till we meet
again onscreen—one, two—.” But the most compelling of
MacAskill’s amor de longh poems are
those in which a conceit weaves the speaker’s experience with that of the
distant beloved, fashioning a sense of togetherness from the shared reality of
being physically apart. In one poem, “I
miss / putting my hand on your leg
// while driving,” a small though in
no way minor admission about travelling together, leads into intimations “of
where we were months ago, and the rivers / that have run through us since – the
beds they’ve made in our bellies, deep enough / to suggest permanence.” Just
past the half-way mark in “Echolocation,” MacAskill introduces the imperative
mood (“Open your mouth and try your lungs”), which lends urgency to the
speaker’s wish for the beloved’s singing to traverse distance and resound in
her body as if it was an instrument:
burrow
in my breast – secure my heart in baritone,
lean
its curves and send back a sketch
in
the deftness of bio sonar – invisible,
tethered.
Much of Murmurations
speaks to its readers in an imperative mood like that used in
“Echolocation,” imploring us in an assured voice to accept uncertainty as
something woven into the links that are freely and mutually sustained to some
extent in all relationships, no matter their form or intensity.
[1] MacAskill, Annick. “Launchpad:
Murmurations, by Annick MacAskill.” Interview with 49th Shelf. https://49thshelf.com/Blog/2020/05/25/Launchpad-Murmurations-by-Annick-MacAskill