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

Kim Fahner : ICQ, by Matthew Walsh

ICQ, Matthew Walsh
Anstruther, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew Walsh’s new chapbook, ICQ, is another Anstruther beauty. I’m more and more fond of chapbooks these days because they feel more intimate to me, as if you’ve been invited into the poet’s mind and heart. This is the case with ICQ. There are just twelve poems, so you feel gathered in and confided in. Walsh uses elegant couplets throughout the collection. Swimming the other morning, in a Northern Ontario lake, I saw a couple of loons in flight. I felt that their flight, as a pair, was a bit like Walsh’s use of couplets as a set form in ICQ—so elegant and graceful on the white space of the page, an almost visual respite in a challenging pandemic year.

I need to admit that I’m a fierce fan of Walsh’s poetry, and that I really loved These are not the potatoes of my youth. Like that book, this one is also confessional in tone. ICQ is about trying to find out who you are, where and when you can safely be yourself, and how we all seek a path to walk through this life. The poem that opens the chapbook is “Mystery,” a piece that speaks to the complexity of romantic relationships. Here, a boyfriend “has no ears” to listen when the speaker tries “to explain/the verb of my own heart.” There it is—that quickly and deftly turned Walsh line that pierces you when you least expect it while reading. In “Ellipses,” Walsh writes of how religion harms self-expression, especially in terms of sexuality. They write: “it was as if talk of the human//body was denied due to internal error or the mixture/of Catholicism and shame in knowing you genuflect//in a building to worship a man who lives in the sky.”

Someone’s need to hide their true identity, because of society’s ridiculous and archaic hang ups with sex, is further explored in “Soft Core,” when Walsh writes “I had never seen this before, the moment my desires/were on screen like this” and “my mistake was accepting opinion of others/to be true when the only true thing is I am living.” Further, they write: “I wish I could have let it be known/that I was queer earlier in my memory.” Then, in “Iamb,” the quiet moment of certain realization is written down: “I realized that I found my people much later in life/and that I can make choices for myself.” These journeys that we go on take up so much of our lives, and we keep evolving as we go, even if there is a great deal of pain in the middle of the growth spurts that we encounter.

The world of cell phones and social media—along with the duelling notions of human isolation and connectivity—plays a key role in ICQ, which is internet language for “I seek you.” Internet dating is common now, and people are tethered to their phones in a way that has only increased in recent years. In “Desire,” during sex, the speaker says, “like the internet I open window/after window after window.” In “Pea Cloud,” auto-correct in a text message changes “I think I am working through/Mon-Thurs to I am ethereal,” further underlining the way in which we confuse ourselves with the way we speak, write, and communicate with one another. In “Mystery,” again, Walsh ponders: “It’s weird to think humans created language/yet we can’t speak to each other—it’s like texting.” We lose and then re-make meaning in new ways when we communicate through electronic devices, perhaps more often muddying the water of meaning than we can ever really know.

Deep undercurrents of beauty run through ICQ when Walsh conjures up “a perfectly laid out deer/skeleton near dark,” a “world where you can’t tell ocean from sky,” and “if my body was dot dot dot it was punctuation, ellipses.” In “Desire,” they write of “spring blossoms in the air, Alexander Keith’s, white moths/catching moonlight while he ate the apple off the knife.” In “Pea Cloud,” there is “an affinity to rise from the ocean//feeling like I was born, made of sea foam, cloud.” Walsh has a way with images, so that a sunrise after a night of lovemaking is remembered vividly as “this baby/blue, then pink” seeping “out from what was the pupil//of the sky over Lake Ontario.” Their work is stunning and fresh at every turn of line, couplet, and page.

While this chapbook contains just twelve poems, Matthew Walsh’s ICQ is honest, poignant, and feels substantial in the themes it addresses. Reading it just makes a person wish that the next full- length collection was already here. This is a chapbook that will hopefully lead to more work. For me, as a keen reader of poetry, that time can’t come quickly enough.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Russell Carisse : Late Summer Flowers, by Julian Day

Late Summer Flowers, Julian Day
Anstruther Press, 2021

 

 

 

One is confronted and comforted by a strange familiarity, in Julian Day’s chapbook, Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press). A familiar one seeks out to revisit, or rather revisits one as companion along journeys into memories of past loves, old towns, and localized mythologies. Joined with the start by a poet's familiar, the roads lead back home to the unfinishing resolution of an old lover, a funerary process one is glad to have this companionship for, while tender subjects are rehashed with soft hands. Here also, are the records of out of the way places and their witness to lores of shared culpability in these names expressed, marking places, as they are struck out like passing signs on the highway. Names to be mouthed in their creative destuction. And yet, one is often stopping roadside to pick ditch-weeds, and smoke/share other late summer flowers, with stolen time together in the glacial pause of emence landscapes and small towns, where one can find new points in the constellation of these poems, and feel welcome to revisit moments of transformation, growth, death in this “the final naming of things”.

 

 

 

 

Russell Carisse is currently hiding in the woods, until it's safe to come out. Their half-baked ideas are found in antilang.magazine, The Quarantine Review, Utopia Project, The Pi Review, Funicular, Periodicities, Still: The Journal, The Paragon Journal, in translation at Le Watts Revue, Nomography (Sideroxylon, 2020), and forthcoming debut chapbook BRICKWORKS (Frog Hollow Press).

Kim Fahner : Late Summer Flowers, by Julian Day

Late Summer Flowers, Julian Day
Anstruther Press, 2021.

 

 

 

 

Anstruther Press has a reputation for publishing beautiful chapbooks. It comes as no surprise, then, that Julian Day’s Late Summer Flowers is no exception to the rule. Set in Saskatchewan, Day’s debut chapbook is a lovely thing. If you’ve travelled to Saskatchewan, you’ll recognize the wide open space that the landscape offers to the poet. That sense of spaciousness is present in Day’s work.

In “Qu’Appelle Moon,” Day conjures up the space of the valley itself, referring to the moon as a “pearl over water,” a “prairie lantern,” a “coyote’s eye,” and even as a compass. It is, he writes, the “last lamp/before the final naming of things.” In “Saskatchewan,” the poet writes about the province being the “middle of the west, an easy trapezoid,” and how it is “a province of winter/rye and wheat, a place you left/but never plan to leave.” He speaks about how there is beauty in Saskatchewan’s “show of what’s wide open,/whether the sky or the sharptail’s refusal of it.” The landscape of the place causes you to pause, to stop and take stock of internal things.

There is an underlying sense of nostalgia in this collection, of remembering and longing for moments of connection from years gone by. In “Godzilla (1998),” the speaker refers to the unspoken boundaries that often exist between close male-female friendships and romantic relationships, and how tenuous a line that can sometimes be. The poet writes: “The world may not have been simpler then,/but we could explain away the rumblings--/that what we felt were only tremors/and not a creature in the seabed.” From a distance, looking back on the past from an older age, we tend to romanticize it all, gloss it over with gilded paint, in sharp contrast to our more consistent responsibilities and worries of having grown up and reached adulthood.

In “Summer Flowers,” the poet documents a youthful relationship that broke apart. The poem begins, beautifully, with the line “I found you at the edge of summer,/falling for the wide-open road/and the French in your voice.” By the final stanza, though, the relationship is “over and ended,” just a “fragment of a moment” in a life’s journey, “two lovers/in a haze of gin and weed, the late summer flowers dying at our feet.” These memories, these absences that are made present, are scattered through the collection in a bittersweet fashion.

Everything here is tied to the natural world and landscape of the prairies. In the landscape, the poet finds comfort and respite. In “Qu’Appelle,” Day writes of how the fields express absence “as flowers, blue notes/resolving to a cadence,/the prairie’s memory/of that moment.” In “Passage,” he writes of how a journey “is not an ending.” This poem is about loss, about illness and mortality, and how people survive after the ones they have loved deeply have departed. There is, he writes, a “summer land,” where “you and I can rest in tallgrass,/and your heavy spirit/can finally find its sleep.” After turmoil, there is a place where a mourner can “follow you/to where your troubles pass/as birds.” If you’ve set foot in Saskatchewan, you’ll likely know this sense of freedom, of how the landscape unlocks the sharp clasp of pain and opens you up to some kind of peace.

There are just ten poems in Julian Day’s Late Summer Flowers, but they feel as if they are windows opened to catch a summer breeze, opening themselves up to encourage the reader to blossom, too. It is a strong debut collection, and I look forward to seeing a full length book of Day’s work sometime soon.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Julian Day : Skylarking, by Mark Callanan

Skylarking, Mark Callanan
Anstruther Press, 2020

 

 

          St. John’s poet Mark Callanan is the author of two previous collections and a chapbook, and Skylarking (Anstruther Press, 2020) is his first publication in almost a decade, since 2011’s Gift Horse (Signal Editions). In its ten poems, grounded in the lyric, Callanan explores through recollection the ways in which distance focuses understanding, and how youth and restlessness echo through the rest of our lives.

          Callanan plays on the title “Skylarking” in a number of senses – several times with its definition as horseplay (as in “The Rider” and “Skylarking”), but also in a very literal sense, as the vehicle in the opening poem, where the speaker and their friends drive a rusted old Buick Skylark carelessly, invincibly past their small town, flipping off other drivers, a twelve-gauge in the trunk, finally arriving at a road outside town, where hopping out of the car:

          … I jumped a culvert,
          hung a pop can on a spruce
          tree near the shoulder. The day
          was dying. Crows gathered
          on the highest branches,
          elemental, perched exactly.
          He took aim. I claimed
          the driver’s seat and waited.
                     (“Shotgun”) 

The poems as a whole represent snapshots of a larger childhood: of being flung over the handlebars of a bike, remembering the “blind animal fear / of what comes next / and what comes next / and what comes after” (“The Rider”); of watching from the periphery, “knights on horseback / surveying a castle under siege” as developers tear down trees and clear an area central to the speaker’s youth (“Mount”); or watching a baseball game in person, trying to make sense of distant figures and the drama of the game without the cadences of TV play-by-play (“The Score”).

Most startling of all the poems is “Science Camp”. In it, camp counsellors slouch their way through their summers, getting drunk in secluded parks and babysitting “the children of parents obsessed / by the notion that summers spent / in idleness are summers wasted.” On the last day of camp, they take the kids on a day trip to a local medical school, to see, “lungs / butterflied like chicken breasts” and “a hand that made a fist / when with a fist you tugged / the tendons like a bell-pull”, and where after,

          … something
          in my circuits changed,
          became rerouted or plain
          burnt out by the thought of us
          all trudging back through
          heavy rain, having seen
          the things of which a man is made …

“Science Camp” harkens back to Gift Horse and its examinations of mortality after a near-death experience; it’s difficult not to read those poems and then see the events detailed in “Science Camp” as emerging from the same source. To the kids, this is just another camp trip, an involuntary way to kill some time on a weekend in early July; but to Callanan, with the benefit of distance and experience, it’s a lesson on impermanence, in the ways our parents warned us when we were children (and which we immediately ignored); and how our roles so suddenly, so jarringly can change, as in “Skylarking”, in which the speaker recalls their own childhood injuries, whether horsing around the house with siblings or flying off a bike into gravel; the realization, having become a parent in the time since, that, “finally I know / the cost of joy awake, aglow”, the italicized text, from George Meredith’s “The Lark Ascending”, another nod to the title of the collection.

A current of restlessness runs through the poems: whether the ease at which a shotgun is unpacked, loaded, and readied; the unreality of watching from the nosebleeds as a pitcher falters under jeers and catcalls; or the grotesque way a preserved hand grasps beyond death as its tendons are pulled and released. Callanan circles back in the final poem, ending the collection the way he started: on the road, the poem’s opening stanza seeming to build once again towards escape. But whereas “Shotgun” finds its home in that space owned by youth, friendship, and unspent energy, “Road Trip” starts there and offers a return. As the speaker and their companion set out, quest-like, on the highway, they find it – the revelation, their quest objective, the “text beneath the text” – only briefly, before it quickly slips away, taking its leave “at a motel / where we stopped to rest”. Drifting over to the shoulder, they stop, let traffic pass them by, before the knowledge settles that it’s in this they’ve found their home: in the drive out and back, in its rhythms and repetitions, but also in the easy familiarity of each other, revisiting over and over “what we knew, the same / old tropes that come at us / again, renewed”.

 

 

 

 

Julian Day lives in Winnipeg. He is the recipient of both an Arc Award of Awesomeness (March 2021), as well as Editor's Mom's Choice in the 2019 CV2 2-Day Poem Contest. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming at Arc (online), Barrelhouse, and Banshee, and his debut chapbook is Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021).

Shazia Hafiz Ramji : Fears, Anxieties, Schisms, Trends: An Interview with Conor McDonnell

Conor McDonnell is a physician & poet. He has published two chapbooks, The Book of Retaliations (Anstruther Press), and Safe Spaces (Frog Hollow Press). He received Honourable Mention for The Fiddlehead’s 2018 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the RawArtReview 2019 Charles Bukowski Prize, and was runner-up in the Vallum 2019 Contemporary Poetry Prize. His debut collection will be published later this year. Conor chats fears, anxieties, schisms, trends, and Nick Cave, with Shazia Hafiz Ramji.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Your chapbook, Safe Spaces, was published in 2017 by Frog Hollow Press. How did you land this sweet deal?

Conor McDonell: Hey, Shazia, I suppose I was very lucky, really. I’m not a networker (in any facet of my life) so I have always tended to develop close connections with small numbers of people, and it’s on me to choose those people wisely. Paul Vermeersch was an early teacher who grew to become a close friend and ongoing mentor. He introduced me to Jim Johnstone who published my first chapbook with Anstruther Press and who also grew to be a fierce friend, supporter and mentor. Shane Neilson is a close colleague of Jim’s and Jim encouraged me to submit my next project to Frog Hollow Press. Shane was most generous with his time and energy, we worked closely on the book together, he had me read aloud many times and made me think about the work from within the work. We also laughed a lot, over two lines in particular! I enjoyed working with Shane on Safe Spaces and learned a lot from the experience as was previously the case with Jim and Paul.

SHR: On your blog, you’ve said that Safe Spaces “is a collection of lyric poems which explore personal fears and anxieties as they connect and exist within larger societal trends and schisms.” What are the fears, anxieties, schisms, trends, at the heart of this beautiful chappie?

CM: Thank you for the chappie comment, very generous. I suppose I started writing and publishing at a weird time and place in my life: everything else felt sorted in many ways - relationships, career, health, etc and yet something always feels not quite right to me. I have certainly had some bad stuff happen (like most people), I have reached middle-age and everything from the outside looks rosy but my job terrifies me on a daily basis because I could legitimately kill someone if I have an “off-day.” I have gradually come to realize that the wounds of childhood such as anxiety, grief, night-terrors, PTSD, may sometimes go to sleep for a few years but eventually come back to assail us. At some point in developing Safe Spaces it felt that my function (in writing, in my career) was to publicly declare “yes, I know, this does feel awful,” or, as I say to many of the children I work with, “it’s okay to be scared, tell me what scares you most and let’s talk about that first.” Some parents / patients / families are very uncomfortable with that level of honest engagement so I tend to take the debris from such moments and place it within a universal set of images/circumstances that reflect the “fears, anxieties, schisms, trends, at the heart of this beautiful chappie,” lol. I always hope that someone will read one of my poems and think, “oh, I’m not alone” but I also know a reader won’t trust work that doesn’t feel authentic. I believe authenticity either comes from having lived a thing, or, from having genuine informed empathy for somebody who has. It’s incredibly important to not feel alone, to not feel isolated. I suffer from some pretty aggressive anxiety but one thing that helps me is that I don’t feel alone with my struggles. In my writing I adopt characters, personae, voices etc where I sense that same struggle and fear and I try to externalize it, make it more recognizable. I want people to know I’m open to being part of their conversation so in that regard I try to be more universal than personal with my poems.

Also, no small thing, the book eventually became very much about grief and surviving said state. The book is dedicated to two families, one of which is Nick Cave’s after the sudden loss of their teenage son in a tragic accident. Cave’s first album after his son’s death, Skeleton Tree, was released during the writing of Safe Spaces. I saw him live in Toronto at this time and had a bit of an out of body co-experience with Cave himself. I wrote a poem on the way home that night (Better Living Through Carpentry) and from that point on the book became a treatment of shared grief, the pain of moving forward and the necessity of experiencing all that comes with that. I accept now that most of my anxiety emanates from a combination of grief and anger. I also accepted my physical pain does not always need to be treated or managed, sometimes it simply needs to be acknowledged, first and foremost by me. So, I resolved to talk about that, describe that, vivisect myself with open arms and ears in as honest and creative a way as my meagre talents would allow; hope that my bones might become a map of sorts, follow any rib to get to the heart.

I just now revisited my website where you grabbed that sound-bite and I notice the next line reads, “These poems address what increasingly goes unsaid by creating a unique space and voice for each piece to be absorbed.” It occurs to me that this book snagged between two opposing sentiments: the dedication page contains a quote from the Cave song, “Skeleton Tree,”  which reads “I called out right across the sea, but the echo comes back empty and nothing is for free.” I think I married that to something Robin Richardson said the first time we spoke, she said “please, as an emerging poet, say something.” So, I guess I called out, and in the face of the deafening silence that greets most poetry releases, I created some of the responses I needed to hear as well…

SHR: Thank you for being so candid, Conor. The sense of responsibility you have as a pediatric anesthesiologist translates to tenderness and authenticity in your poems, and I can’t thank you enough for it.

I saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on the same tour as you! Did you see his fan letter to the 10-year-old earlier this year? I was so moved by it. You said that you hope your poems will make someone feel less alone and I think this is what Nick Cave has done for this kid, Ptolemy. I cried seeing that letter, because I did feel like that kid, and I wished that someone had said that to me – to have the strength to be who you are, to like what you like, to do what you want to do, from such a young age. It would’ve made me feel less alone for sure. Would you say writing poems helps you acknowledge your pain and learn how to live?

CM: Yes, yes, yes, you’re talking about The Red Hand Files website! That letter was so moving, and it was incredible that he had already formed a memory of the child from noticing them in the audience at the previous night’s performance. I find Cave’s journey, from one which used to make fun of fan-letters on film to the patient open considerate human being he is now, to be quite inspirational and it makes me optimistic that people can change. Here is someone we considered to basically be a murder-balladeer 25 years ago, now he’s the canary for our humanity as we step into the coal-mine. And, I don’t think this is solely because of his son’s death, he can barely have started to truly process that. I think this change is down to two important relationships, that with his wife who he obviously respects as much as he loves, and Warren Ellis, who has liberated Cave’s soul through greater exploration of sound than was previously possible with other iterations of the Bad Seeds. We need people we deeply love and admire to make us want to be better. I need to tap into that more and start writing love poems for my wife!

With regards to writing my poems, I think I’ve nailed the first part in that I definitely acknowledge my pain; in truth I probably eviscerate myself. I’m not sure that I have yet acquired the skill of learning how to live from lessons within my own writing. That’s why Cave’s responses to the Red Hand files are so astonishing, he has learned to live but also to soothe. I worry that solutions stare me in the face and I am blind to their possibilities, but I’ve got time, will and patience and I’m committed to this journey.

SHR: How was Safe Spaces received by the community at large?

CM: Can I say I don’t know? I think this is one failing of the community whereby we don’t talk about each other’s work in much depth. I send people texts, messages, emails etc and I quote specific poems and lines that have bowled me over (I know I have done so with Annick MacAskill, Dom Parisien, Dani Couture, I think it’s how I first engaged with you!) and it’s always a nice opportunity to engage and chat, but I have to say the response to Safe Spaces was mostly silence. And that is death for me, the only thing worse than not publishing is delivering new life into a void. Don’t get me wrong, people have mentioned it in passing, and Jim Johnstone was a sweetheart and put in a very good mention for Safe Spaces when making end of year recommendations to the Poetry website in 2017. There are times I think if it wasn’t for “extra-mile” support and friendship from Jim and Paul and you and Julie Crawford, I might have actually ‘given up’ at the start of 2019. I look back on Safe Spaces as a body of work I’m proud of and a great collaboration with Shane, but as album titles go I don’t know if it’s my First Born is Dead or my Kicking Against the Pricks. As I said above, I called out and in the face of the deafening silence that greets most poetry releases, I created some of the responses I needed to hear as well…

SHR: I agree that “extra-mile” support is where the magic happens... I still have your postcard on my fridge from when Safe Spaces first came out! Aside from the extra mile and the postcard, though, I had definitely heard about Safe Spaces and read it when I got it, and I think it’s a very good chappie. What do you mean when you say you “created some of the responses you needed to hear”? You said that before too.

CM: It’s there in the quote from Skeleton Tree that I mention above, however, I’m not resilient enough for my own echo to come back empty; not yet. In order to guard against that I knew I didn’t want this book to be merely illustrative, it also needed to be transformative, even if that’s ultimately only for me. I may over-reach here but I’m thinking this is something you achieved in Conspiracy of Love. Many young Toronto writers have talked to me about how important that poem is for them, and this is me echoing that back to you if you haven’t already heard that yourself. 

Last night, at the Red Hand Files show, Nick Cave (am I ever going to shut up about him?) said, “the worst thing people said to me after my son died was, ‘he’s still with you, he’s in your heart’, but I couldn’t feel him. It wasn’t until someone said, ‘take him out of your heart and let him walk beside you’ that I felt he might still be with me”. So, even though I wrote those poems two-three years ago, and Cave only said those words last night, I think I was ready to let those poems leave me but I wasn’t ready to let them disappear. I needed the poems to feel like a child that’s been well prepared for life by its parent, “go on ride your bike, you might fall off and I might not be there to catch you in the moment, but you’ve got enough with you now to cushion the shock until I get there”.

I think what I struggle with most at the moment as an ‘emerging poet’ is that it’s hard to see what’s actually me unless you stand really far back. Then when you come in close again, if you can get your arms around it that’s me, if you can’t it’s not truth and I’m still failing at this thing; but I’m trying. Shane Neilson said, “there’s a lot of falling [falling not failing!] in this book”, and he’s right, I was in freefall and it shows. But from where I stand, so new still to this world of words, I think I kinda stuck the landing. I climbed a few ladders to get this work out there and now I want to get to a higher point and jump off all over again. Thank you for this, you’re an amazing person. I truly enjoyed Port of Being and I can’t wait to see what comes next for both of us. Cx

SHR: Wait wait wait - YOUR FIRST BOOK IS COMING OUT LATER THIS YEAR. Please tell me about it.

CM: Yes, it’s called Recovery Community, and it “explores the intimate connections between deftly-layered moments of trauma, illness and loss.” It’s not as depressing as it sounds, it’s a bit of a trip through 20th and early 21st century pop culture that recruits movies, actors, addicts and artists to provide a Greek-chorus rally-call that re-imagines the way the world has been (re)presented to us. The Vallum Prize poem from last year, Twin Peaks in under two minutes, is a good example of my work in this book (http://www.vallummag.com/poem_conor_mcdonnell.html). I have tried to take what’s familiar through media and art, and give it a new voice that hopefully encourages readers to revisit / re-imagine older values and attitudes in a fashion more in line with their own highly evolved lenses and intuitions. I cut this quote out of an earlier part of our conversation, “In my writing I adopt characters, personae, voices etc where I sense that same struggle and fear and I try to externalize it, make it more recognizable. I want people to know I’m open to being part of their conversation so in that regard I try to be more universal than personal with my poems.” It was in reference to Safe Spaces but it absolutely still applies to Recovery Community. I ended up being surprised at some of the poems I ended up leaving out of this book, whether it was due to relentlessness of tone or losing some long poems in order to allow readers a moment to breathe, relax, maybe even recover, lol. Hmm, actually now that I think about it, we dropped the Twin Peaks poem at the last minute too! Still can’t believe I was okay with that…

SHR: Sounds genius, Conor! Eagerly awaiting to recover from the apocalypse with your debut book of poems.

CM: PS Anesthesiologists ‘recover’ people by waking them up, or, as they in France, réanimation ...

Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, THIS magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, and is forthcoming in EVENT, and Maisonneuve, and Gutter: the magazine of new Scottish and international writing. Her poetry and prose have been nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes by Poetry Northwest and carte blanche, respectively. Shazia was named as a “writer to watch” by the CBC. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is a columnist for Open Book and is at work on a novel.