rabbit, Claudia Coutu
Radmore
Aeolus House Press, 2020.
In that initial poem, the poet wonders about the point at which “concepts/get so complex you have to have language to form them,” and how lovely is her tip of the hat to how poets love metaphor when she writes: “what’s this?/this is an old toolshed./no, this is a great past love.” She suggests in her work that it is the poet who is the seer—who sees the poetry and the wonder in the world around them, and it is the poet who will usher in readers to tour that ‘outer’ world in a different way. (If they follow the poet, they will begin to see an ‘inner’ world in what they initially just thought was an ‘outer’ one. There is depth, if the reader wants to follow the poet…further in…) Throughout a close reading of rabbit, one is aware that Radmore is exploring notions of landscape and place from within the slipstream of language. Too, she is curious about how time and memory works in the human head and heart.
The collection is divided up into sections, and each one is unique, but the main thematic notions connect them beautifully. In “On Fogo,” Radmore documents the beauty of Fogo Island, off the northeastern tip of Newfoundland. She notes, “Fogo was once a piece of Ireland; in the 180 million years since, it has developed its own fauna, its own geology, its own stories…” In the poem “sea oyster leaf sea olive,” the poet writes that Fogo clings “to your skin like scales.” It is a place that situates itself between here and there, past and present, sea and sky. The pleasure, she says, is “in picking in the cold clean air, the big sky, with/ocean waves curling and crashing.” In “berry grounds,” Radmore speaks of her love affair with language: “tuckamore, tuckamore./your mouth wants to play with the word in the wind.” In “islanders take time,” there is tell of the man who runs the ferry, the one who takes her ticket: “he didn’t have much time to talk/but I sensed he would have/if he could have.” Something about Newfoundland, and Fogo Island, is about honouring conversation and connection, about an ancient and inherited sort of valuing of people’s lives and stories. Genetic memory—in a way that carries it forwards into the present and future in a hopeful way—seems woven into this part of the book.
In the section titled “En Famille,” there are poems of origin places in Quebec. In “as tumbled over rim in roundy wells,” the poet writes a loving tribute to her mother: “and we thought/we thought my mother/would last forever.” Time passes in a life, and Radmore knows how to write poems that speak to that passage, however painful and bittersweet it might be. In the section titled “ghost apples,” there is a keen and observant poetic eye that takes note of things like the idea that “a blue whale’s heart [is] large enough/for a human to curl up in a lower lobe,” and that is also “intrigued/by injured things/turtle egg shells/crushed and scattered.” The care in looking is what carries through the poems in rabbit.
The final poem is the one that links to the title of the collection. “our very own leporid” speaks to a wild rabbit that visits Radmore’s backyard. It opens with a tribute to Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Exultation.” The rabbit begins with regular visits, with the human house owners offering it occasional carrots, but then progresses to her arrival as a wounded animal. The poet tries to contact a local wildlife centre, asking for guidance. She and her partner tend to the dying rabbit. Radmore writes that “Dickinson’s poem/took my thoughts into a deep somewhere/a somewhere of return/a return to the earth.” After the rabbit has died in her arms, the poet considers how humans face death, ponders how we “learn to live with all these walls/these mounting griefs.” She tenderly tucks the rabbit’s paw under its body, putting her into a small backyard grave, “so all parts of her will travel together/wherever she is going.”
What’s interesting about rabbit, as a poetry collection, is that it feels lively and vibrant as you read through the poems. I think of spotting my backyard rabbits, or of seeing their pawprints in the winter snow, and I think we would do well to learn from their mindfulness and spontaneity in how they live out their days. In rabbit, Claudia Radmore invites her reader to stop, to sink into each poem, to be mindful of what can be sensed and observed. The poems leap forward, like rabbits across a field, but stop—occasionally—to take stock of what they see and sense around them. So, too, do we…as readers.
