Shane Schick : The Dark Unwind, by Paola Ferrante and :), by Derek Beaulieu

The Dark Unwind, Paola Ferrante
Knife|Fork|Book, 2022

:), Derek Beaulieu
Anstruther Press, 2023

 

 

 

Give someone who normally doesn’t read much poetry a chapbook. The first question they might ask – either aloud or to themselves – is, are they happy poems, or sad poems? As Paola Ferrante’s ‘The Dark Unwind,’ (Knife|Fork|Book) and Derek Beaulieu’s 😊 (Anstruther Press) make clear, the best work doesn’t usually offer a simple answer.  

Ferrante, for example – whose bio describes her as a writer living with depression – makes clear from the outset that she is ready to confront every kind of low. Titles like “When the Reason For Down Is In Your Nature” and “Bogeyman” practically speak for themselves, but part of the poems’ power is in how they evoke fear and dread of potential darkness as much as they illustrate more palpable sources of misery.

“I worry whether I’ve swallowed a cloud,” she writes in “Monophoba Is Not A Fear Of Flying.” Elsewhere, in “Over 35,” she asks, “If I am a witch, will you drown me?”

The Dark Unwind also captures feelings of helplessness amid depression, the continual cajoling and efforts to dismiss the pain, the uncertainty around the future when you’re in the midst of depression and the attempt to simply survive it. The chapbook also underscores the role of poetry in the latter task, such as this passage from “The Sun’s Setting Soon”:

. . . I bite into a crisp apple. Here’s
a flower. I breathe
in. Breathe out. Smell the harsh

Soil without my glasses my skin
came alive, filtered
through waterfalls. Maybe senses
are all we’ve got . . .

It befits these poems that they are so clearly narrated by what feels like a consistent “I,” whether the speaker is actually intended to be Ferrante or not. 

In Beaulieu’s work, meanwhile, we zoom out from the intimately personal into what feels like a curated history of the smiley face. This includes a possible origin story involving researchers from NASA, appearances in Banksy’s graffiti artworks and even some repurposing by Nirvana for some concert merch.

This chapbook is not explicitly labelled as poetry, and while Beaulieu has a long track record in the field as the past Poet Laurette of Calgary and Banff, they don’t even come across as prose poems. Instead, it’s more the way the series of paragraphs are organized and details juxtaposed that makes them feel like something greater than a historical record that might have been published in a traditional essay form.

Then there are the moments where the language simply sings, such as when Beaulieu describes the smiley face sonically as a “dit-dit-dah,” and when he notes the time programmers began allowing them to be rendered on a computer:

The galaxial greeting continues to transmit through the keys that we type.

A recurring thread through Beaulieu’s chapbook is the fact that smiley faces have often been used to communicate or represent something far different than happiness. There is the Smiley Face Gang, believed to be responsible for the deaths of 45 young men. There is Boss Smiley, the head of a right-wing militia in a comic book. Appearances – even of a familiar symbol – are often other than what they appear.

This is just as true in Ferrante’s chapbook, which, without directly naming it, conjures a smiley face in her poem “But You’re Okay By Schmidt’s Pain Scale.” Here she records a litany of advice, apparently from well-wishers who tell the speaker they should cheer up, get out of bed or take a bath (though all of these pick-me-up activities quickly take a menacing turn). The smiley face masks onlookers who just want the speaker to get over it already.

In “After Midnight,” Ferrante evokes the title of her chapbook, writing about how she has “danced with the wolf, a slow waltz into the dark unwind.” It’s worth pointing out that dancing, traditionally, is a happy activity, with waltzing in particular the kind of dance you might do bearing . . . a smiley face.

Over the past number of years there have been a number of anthologies and collections that deliberately select poems based on their positioning on the happy-or-sad spectrum. The most marketable are obviously those on the positive side, such as The Path To Kindness, edited by James Crews. For poems dealing with depression, the options feel nearly infinite.

When you read both of these chapbooks in conjunction, however, you begin to realize how well they demonstrate the poetic opportunity to explore the extreme ends of emotion – and that a sign of great writing is how well it allows you to traverse the many intersections between them.

 

 

 

 

 

Shane Schick’s poems have been published in Juniper: A Poetry Journal, Paddler Press and many other publications. He lives with his family in Whitby, Ont. More: ShaneSchick.com/poetry. Twitter/X: @ShaneSchick