University of Regina Press, 2020
The poem “Field Notes for the Self”
appears near the end of the book and, like most other poems, it is written in
prose and interweaves bits of stories. It is a microcosm of the rest of the
book. It brings together Buddhism, country music, Plato. Early morning dissociation
and ceremonies of coffee making and cigarette smoking, moments of patience and
strength-building, moments of stillness. Dogs and their ability to sense and
live things more clearly, and further, than humans. An ill-defined woman with
whom communication is impossible – in this instance a poet. A haunting by a
father, forgotten practices from an Irish grandmother. Named places and
elements of the land, named animals, insects, flowers, trees. The People and
their language – nêhiyawak, nêhiyawewin.
And a self that enunciates itself in the
second person. An interpellation of itself; an interpellation of the reader. A
longing to be the point of connection between present surroundings and kin from
the past.
There are passages where selves are elided
– a woman, unnamed except for her location, Kluane, the Ruby Range, the Yukon,
whose book of poetry is being read by the man (the third person self) seen in
the mirror who left you (the second person self) standing there while he busies
himself and reads; a woman to whom you/he want/s to respond, to tell things she
already knows. The poem answers hers, his own, your own: “Years of writing the
same poem, over and over, like a round-rolled stone in the shoreline palm of a
glacial lake. The archetypal poem. Not the archetype in our minds but the one
in our DNA. The perfect one that corresponds to this world, not the haze of some Platonic form.” (83)
Through this elision, retraction of
selves, in their dissolution, Lundy achieves a concreteness of feeling and
sensation. There are passages of immense beauty: “Right now, outside the back
door, the wild roses bloom. The bees gather. This is the northern-prairie
June’s brief, pink-fleeting flirtation with eternity.” (85)
The prose poems in this book allow for
that unbroken flow through which the self can slip out – but there are verse
poems here and there throughout the book, that speak to a different experience,
that speak of oppositions, of irreconcilable realities: “And while you, too,
have been dreaming, / you cannot even name the things you have seen: black
horse, meteorites like a necklace of fire // across the midnight horizon. No
stars.” (3)
Line breaks that speak to reversals and
metamorphoses: “You move the snow / shovel from the front / deck to the back.”
(23)
Isolated lines that speak of certainties
that do not bear to be associated, surrounded, qualified: “When are the times
we tell nothing but the truth?” (70)
Ghazals and their breathless chanting,
stripped here of much of their form perhaps in order to better maintain secret
connections among their elements, as among the last words of each line: peas,
sun; sink, her (a carp); Christmas, branches; heat, altar; power pole, wind
(36).
And line breaks that carry impact,
transform one violence, destructive, into another, regenerative – a violence
that asks for the end of violence, for a transformation of the self of those
who practice it:
I will ask you to
remember
the rotten corpses
of bison,
the rotting
corpses of
my missing and
murdered sisters,
and aunties and
kohkums and lovers,
and the rotting
teeth of the children
fed fat on
McDonald’s.
This stanza is from “Arbeit Macht Frei,”
which I first heard Lundy read in January at a Matriarchs on Duty/Idle No More
gathering in opposition to the University where I do my own work, an
institution where many thought that anyone could speak about any kind of
violence, that violence can be spoken about without recreating violence - that
just anyone can speak about missing and murdered Indigenous women in any way
they please, without regard for those who are potential and actual targets of
violence. The poem by itself already counters violence by speaking to what is
known to all but has led to no action. The setting and quiet anger of that
reading only made it more obvious, and urgent.
Perhaps that is the function of the book
in general – not to stand against colonial violence, or rather not only that,
since this violence can be read throughout –, to tie together certainties and
truth and attach them to a renewal of action, a different way of relating, a
different view of the self. So while the
search for an uninterrupted flow between memories, people, nonhuman lives, and
places dominates the book, Lundy interrupts this search where obstacles exist
for this flow.
Against them, truths must be affirmed and
limitations recognized: “No fight left in you. If other seasons are possible,
it’s only the stones who remember.” (61)
And questions must be asked: “And does
saying that, the irreverence of it, move you closer to where you want to be?”
(55)
Jérôme Melançon writes and
teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. He is the
author of two books of poetry, De perdre
tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas
quelque part (2016) with Éditions des Plaines, one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité
(Metispresses, 2018), and has a bilingual chapbook out above/ground press, Coup.
