Medrie Purdham’s debut poetry collection, Little Housewolf (Véhicule Press, 2021), won the City of Regina Award for the 2022 Saskatchewan Book Awards, and was also short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award. This book of so-called “domestic miniatures” was justifiably acclaimed for its virtuosity and unpredictable jubilance. Intensely imagined in terms of subject matter and verbal dexterity, the poems in Little Housewolf contain some of the finest lyric poetry being written today. Reading them, one can almost overhear the individual words murmuring gratitude at suddenly finding themselves appearing on the page together. An extraordinarily inventive poet, Purdham’s writing has been published in Best Canadian Poetry several times, and she’s currently working on another collection. If this new work simply extended her success in Little Housewolf, it would find many enthusiasts—her signature style of exquisite exuberance is present in the poems she’s been writing lately—but she’s doing some things differently now. She’s developed the confidence not only to write longer poems (“Cursive,” a tribute to a grandmother who lived with Alzheimer’s, is almost nine pages long), but also to engage in more formal experimentation. Most important to the new writing, Purdham contracted COVID in late 2020 and is now contending with Long COVID. Her earlier writing had an enviably broad intellectual and emotional range; her new poems maintain this steady curiosity in the world, but there’s more grief. The anguish is punishing. Worried that her wounded brain wouldn’t be capable of writing poetry, she began studying the Rubik’s Cube, improving her skill at solving the puzzle (her personal best is two and a half minutes), and came upon a provisional title for the new collection: The Solve, a word that embodies the challenges of the Rubik’s Cube and the difficulty involved in creating new work. There is, she writes, “the purity of salvage.” I met with her in February in Regina to talk about the collection on which she’s been working.
As a longtime admirer of her poetry, I’m relieved and thrilled that she’s been entirely successful at writing more poems. Her sheer joy in words persists in the new work. From “Megafauna”:
When my father mentions
the giraffe he autopsied in that rosette year,
I’m ruminant. Did the bloodfaulted giraffe
die, was the question, of a cavorting malice?
Was it full of arsenic. It fell to my father to know.
Who dives inside us? Who breaches the boundary?
(emphasis in original)
It’s “a mid-life book,” Purdham told me, when I commented on the collection’s gravitas, its poignant explorations of grief alongside its elastic experiments in structure. There is honest despair, which is hard to maintain and harder to get right on the page. The Rubik’s cube, she learns, “like all platonic solids [has] a knack for elegy.” But the moments of elegy in these poems are grappling with the possibility that the talent responsible for the first book is irretrievably lost to neurological damage. COVID has turned the speaker’s mind in “Cursive” to “a single rubber glove”:
little nubblesquid,
rippling into itself, a blabber of a handshake. Frankly,
this is not how I wanted to touch things.
Its suctionverse is stealing all the nomenclature!
. . . Make it stop.
The poems don’t stop, their unstinting integrity refuses to turn away from their fear of incapacity. And fortunately, Purdham’s gift for encouraging words to rejoice in being themselves hasn’t abandoned her. The poem “What the Fog Wasn’t” is an astonishing repudiation of so-called COVID brain fog. Playfully excoriating the imprecision of the term, the poem identifies the way that all damage, whether neurological or existential, manifests a shape particular to each person who experiences these confusions and griefs. The poem should be circulated among health care workers certainly, but all of us need to take in the “flare / where thought was,” the “exoskeletons / [the fog has left] on the windowsill.” I’ve no doubt that Purdham will complete this book and it will expand the readership her debut collection so deservedly gathered. The poems in Little Housewolf were composed pre-COVID. As more and more people become battered by the pandemic and its ongoing trauma, these new poems go far to make Purdham’s work important in a new way. They’ve become necessary.
