Kim Fahner : UNMET, by stephanie roberts

UNMET, stephanie roberts
Biblioasis, 2025

 

 

 

UNMET, the second collection of poetry by stephanie roberts, asks readers to consider what sorts of things are “unmet” in their own lives. Perhaps it is to do with expectations, with how humans tend to disappoint themselves when they have expectations that don’t come to fruition. Perhaps we are not able to meet one another with clear communication, or see our desires blossom into something tangible. A reading of UNMET leaves a reader considering what parts of their life have yet to be discovered, and what has missed or lost and not yet been found.

The book hosts a series of titular poems (with the word “unmet” referenced) that are placed throughout the collection, so that the reader is never really allowed to stray from consideration of what it is that is missing. If humans live too much in the longing and seduction of what the future holds, they miss what’s going on around them. The climate crisis is present here, in poems like “Catch a Falling Knife,” as the speaker refers to forest fires in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, where “Western wildfires bathe British Columbia,/soap its armpits in smoke/and carelessness.”  It is present, as well, in “Entanglement,” when roberts writes, “somewhere off the coast of orange county California,/the grandest animal that has ever lived swims tangled/in a fishing line,” and “in ottawa, on the fourth floor, near the rear atrium/of the canadian museum of nature, i sit/in the chamber of a blue whale’s heart, weeping.” The reader is left to ponder about whether it’s just too late, and whether other desired expectations can even be met if the world ends because of human greed. This idea can be shifted from macro to micro, from universal to particular, as it might be reflected in relationships between humans, or even between humans and the natural world.

There’s a distinct current of conversation in UNMET—between friends and lovers, between humans and the earth and water and sky, between past/present/future, between family members, and between well known musicians. In “Lady Fine is for Sugar,” the poet recollects a conversation with their grandmother, how she would say “You are well, not fine. Fine is for sugar!” and referencing the feminist strength of Cardi B who “levitated up a stripper pole/like a fuckin’ phoenix against the stench/of respectability politics.” Later, in one of the Unmet poems that appears early in the collection, roberts writes of how Marilyn Monroe “had this radiation,/nakedness was her tongue of fire,” but during church services, would force “smaller self against the world.” The reader is left thinking about how women can either increase or decrease their light for the good of themselves or others, and depending on what society requires for them to be successful. The notion of wearing masks, and of dialing down the intensity of desire or expectation even, is a way of not being true to self or identity. The systems within which we live, as humans—as women, as well—are ones that require study and navigation, but which also need to be subverted and rewritten.

A reader will find both glints of specificity and simplicity, as well as complexity in UNMET, just as they will in life’s journey. “Ordinary” times that existed before the arrival of Covid, seem to wobble and tip precariously, and roberts’s pandemic poems speak to the ways in which a current event or happening like “Monday quiet and empty streets,” nudge us into remembering “spring 2020/with all our suffering.” Loss was fiercely rooted in an unprecedented lockdown period when everyone was forced to go within, to the loss of the poet’s father, someone “taking leave in the midst of disaster.” Loss cannot be avoided, is woven into the way life shifts across the page of time and space, so the reader is reminded that the two ways of being—within presence and absence—are too intertwined to separate.

roberts’s poetic imagery is crystalline and vibrant, drawing the reader in with its uniquely surreal consistency. So many lines and phrases sing, including ones like: “In an empty apartment, you butter/A sandwich on both sides with daydreams,” “Wearing a lightweight twill jacket,/a woman walks out the door with her life,” and “A woman orders rose-shaped pink/pleasure with courage for tomorrow.” Lines like these are hypnotic, inviting readers to consider how a seemingly simple image can bloom into a brilliant metaphor.

Be assured: the sparkler on the cover is not the most important thing about stephanie roberts’s UNMET, but the image becomes a metaphor for the temporality of life’s journey. Humans strive so intensely for what lies ahead—maybe dreaming of “better times” or of expectations that might be met—but in so doing, often miss out on the reality that is life in the present. Nothing, no matter how much we might want it to be, is “perfect,” but if we focus more on the present instead of the past or future, we will ruin our lives “a number of times by wanting.” UNMET, when finished, leaves the reader with more questions and thoughts, evaluating longings and appearances, pondering how to best meet the world with thoughtfulness and compassion.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.

Kim Fahner : Strangers, by Rob Taylor

Strangers, Rob Taylor
Biblioasis, 2021

 

 

 

You can’t read Rob Taylor’s Strangers and not be aware of the poignant absences—and by virtue of that, the presences—that populate its pages. The poems are full of love and loss in a way that feels almost physically tangible. In the first poem in the collection, “Strangers,” Taylor writes of his father’s death: “I held his ashes/and wondered where to put them./And I waited for his return./I wait still, whatever sense it makes.” In the same poem, he speaks of reading a friend’s poems and realizing that, by doing so, “in this act I saw my father.” The dead who are beloved to us always visit, it seems, when we least expect them to. They work their way into our narratives—our lives.

In “Speak While Illuminated,” the poet writes of how he used to tap on the wall that separated his bedroom from his parents’ room. There is a shared, coded message that equates three knocks with ‘I love you,’ and one more is added in response from the other side of the wall for ‘too.’  As an adult, much later in life, Taylor writes of being stuck in a stalled elevator, and how he knocks three times on the door. “Four knocks ring back.//My waking mind falls silent, yields the floor./I am not a child anymore.” What parts, I wondered as I read this poem, do we cast aside as we grow into adults? We have still lost a parent, and so—deep inside—we are still very much childlike in our grief of their having died; we are forever our parents’ children.

There are common thematic threads that run through this collection of poems. The notion of story as something that belongs to one person, and then how that notion shapeshifts to include the other participants in the experience and memory, is explored in poems like “You ask me about my mother,” “Smoothing the Holy Surfaces,” and “Weather in Dublin.” These are just a few poems that are set off as tiny ripples to the pebble that Taylor gently tosses into the pond with the first poem in the book. In “You ask me about my mother,” a story that begins with a boy’s neck getting mistakenly caught in the closing trunk of a car is something that makes the poet laugh. His mother also laughs, “each time she hears me tell my story/which isn’t mine, of course, but hers—.” At what point does one’s story become shared, and then told by way of a different lens or perspective? An experience that is shared by two people, of course, will be differently perceived by those two. There is no one set story. In “Smoothing the Holy Surfaces,” another mishap occurs, and a boy with a banged head has grown into a man whose mother laughingly re-tells the story at parties. In hindsight, even difficult things sound funny, when you’re far enough out from the original date of injury, perhaps.

“Weather in Dublin” also speaks to the idea of how story is remembered, told, and transformed by the participant and by the teller, too. A tribute to Seamus Heaney, and specifically to the day of his death, has Taylor thinking about how the death of an influential poet has impacted his own life, how Heaney’s death marked a day, a breath, a moment, and an energetic shift. The first, second, and fourth stanzas are rooted in Vancouver, but the third is set in Dublin: “The night Heaney died it was morning in Dublin,/so what am I going on about? It was thirteen degrees/and partly cloudy. Visibility good, wind from the southwest.” In the final stanza, Taylor writes, “We will remember this morning forever, I am almost sorry to say.” Heaney’s death happened in Dublin, but his going rippled across the world, and poets who have been influenced by his work likely felt his departure as a sudden gust of wind moving through a tree’s leaves.

Taylor’s tribute to the Purdy A-Frame residency, “At Roblin Lake,” is one of the loveliest sections in the book. Taylor captures the physical and metaphorical landscape of Roblin Lake and Purdy’s cottage, exploring the idea of how place seeps into a person’s life, and into a poet’s work. There are the mice, the snow that “blusters in the entry” when someone opens the door, the “flock of terns” that “circle a flooded field,” the place where “the lake and trees” are busy “interlocking fingers,” and the last embers of an outdoor fire after it has been extinguished before bed. Here, then, is another ghost, but one whom Taylor acknowledges probably wouldn’t have liked him because “I don’t drink./I make nice./I stunt my opinions.” A visit to Al Purdy’s grave has the poet confessing: “If we’d met you wouldn’t have let me crash one night/in the loft. Now I’ve slept two months in your bed.” Sometimes ghosts haunt places where you can be still, outside of your own life for a while, and usher in new poems. Thankfully, these poems made it into Strangers, so readers can experience the essence of Roblin Lake without ever having been there.

The structure of Strangers is beautiful. Its title finds itself at the beginning and then at the very end of the collection, framing the poetry inside as if it were a painting. References to Mary Oliver, Heaney, Rainer Maria Rilke, Louise Gluck, Wallace Stevens, and Pablo Neruda weave Taylor’s work into an ancestral poetic web that finds itself rooted in the rhythms of the natural world, and in the way that we find ourselves relating to one another as humans. The poet places haiku pieces throughout, as way stations to mark shifts in content and focus. There are poems that speak to the loss of a father and brothers, but also pieces about marital love, and then poems about the loss of a mother as she declines.

Taylor’s mother struggles with a loss of language, in poignant poems like “On the Occasion of my Mother First Forgetting my Name,” “Diagnosis,” “Most days you still remember,” and “Reprieve.” At the same time as she struggles with dementia, and the loss of language and meaning, the poet’s son begins to experiment with words. In “Long Distance,” Taylor writes of an almost-three-year-old boy who moans for Elmo, his “vowels long slow animals/growing the miles.” In juxtaposition, the poet’s mother, in “Reprieve,” begins to lose words and meanings—“reaches back sometimes” in memory and language. Her life, she tells her son, is frequently more dream-like than a reality that feels fixed and certain.

The poetry in Strangers asks you to consider how memory works, and how stories are told and passed down through generations. Taylor’s poetry presents you with the unavoidable notion of how love and loss are nearly inseparable. This collection is stunning in its poignant intimacy, in how the poet opens the door to his readers, inviting them to listen to his stories, but also bravely nudging them to consider their own recollections of how memory and story are woven into one another.

   

 

 

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