Forty-five Ottawa poets : Jean Van Loon : Two poems

folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets

 

 

Reworking My Will

I’ve been trying to think about death
as I should, with friend after friend
departing, and my own body unveiling
its still-small betrayals. But 

today sun sparks from crystals
of new snow and the cardinal’s
altered song proclaims
that spring will come again. 

And though my husband lives in constant pain
his eyes greet me with their old blue warmth
and we talk and joke together
in the afternoon’s lengthening light. 

A tiny fieldmouse, dark against the snow,
motors like a wind-up toy to seeds
below the feeder, leaving a trail like a fine-
stemmed plant with buds on either side. 

          —First published in The New Quarterly, Summer 2024

 

 

 

Melt Song
          ­–­after Tim Lilburn

 

Winter slumps
          pocked grey whale
                     beached in X-ray light.

Steam spirals from dark slopes
          earth a stirring animal.
                     The river fills freed lungs
                                                   lunges, lashes.
                               Branches bead with twitterings –
                                         all hunger and worn wings.

Dying winter flails
          one last razor-gale, snare of bulking white.
Suppling trees shrug off the leavings.               

Swelling sun’s advance
          widens windows
                     empties houses
          roads like bones laid bare.

Winter a ghost on the grass.

          —First Published in Sawdust Anniversary Chapbook, 2018

 

 

 

 

 

Jean Van Loon is a writer from Ottawa, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg people. Her poems stories and reviews have been published in magazines from coast to coast. Her second poetry book, Nuclear Family (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022) won the 2023 Ottawa Book Award. 

At present she’s working on keeping working, one poem at a time.

 

Jean Van Loon : Life after Life, by A. Garnett Weiss

Life after Life, A. Garnett Weiss
Aeolus House, 2024

         

 

 

Life, after Life follows upon Weiss’s volume, Bricolage, a collection of centos which was a finalist for the 2022 Canadian Authors Association’s Fred Kerner book award. It builds on the considerable talent revealed in Bricolage for selecting elements from works by others and composing them to form new poems.

In the new book, the poet heightens her challenge by drawing lines or phrases from prose rather than poetry, notably obituaries and death notices in the Globe and Mail. The poet sets a further discipline by insisting that each poem be created from writings published on a single day and be compressed into a tight, spare form—a three-line stanza followed by one of two lines—reminiscent of tankas.

Despite (or maybe because of?) these strictures, Weiss’s curation has yielded another rewarding collection of poems. Sixty plus works, which vary in mood, subject, and tone but all in some way reflect their roots in individual human lives. While the poems cohere internally, they retain a mysterious edge, since no line was originally created to follow from the previous or lead to the next. This edginess left me tantalizingly destabilized, open to whatever interpretation(s) might spring up by the end of the poem.

Some poems, such as this one, captured my attention through a vivid scene, then left me pondering its inscrutable end:

Opening Scene

Dancers shadow-play
with the elegance of animals
fearless of the wilderness,

a risk close to
the heart of cruelty.

Another tells a succinct and moving story:

Harvest

Mostly in the capacity of people who struggle,
they ramble along, guided (often without words)
to understanding the prairie sunshine,

abundant yellowgrass burgeoning
in roadless wild spaces. 

Others offer thumbnail sketches of (composite) individuals:

From a world away

Schooled in adaptation,
a refugee remembered
hymns and panpipes,

ancestors on paths
over rough earth to home.

One of my favourites is this:

Splendid terms

Make a toast to those you love,
to one-of-a-kind places that meant the most
right down to the lawn chair.

Recall one act of disobedience, rarely-made
Mistakes, holy like a startled forest animal.

Though the elements used to write Life, after life are not drawn from poetry, they are drawn from accounts of real lives, each with its specific pleasures and griefs, adventures and disappointments, and Weiss has found the poetry in them. She has creatively selected and juxtaposed concrete and original images, spending time among the original fragments to allow her poetic imagination to discern a thread of story, feeling, mood. The tightly compressed poems she weaves with these threads, convey astute political commentary, emotional weight, and philosophical insight—all applicable to lives beyond those celebrated in the original obituaries. This book is a box of savoury bites to please a poetic palate.

 

 

 

 

Jean Van Loon is a writer from Ottawa, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg people. Her second poetry book, Nuclear Family (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022) won the 2023 Ottawa Book Award. Her first, Building on River (Cormorant, 2018), was a finalist for that award. Her story, "Stardust," published in the Queen's Quarterly, was included in Journey Prize Stories 19. Her stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in magazines from coast to coast.
Facebook: Jean Van Loon; Instagram: jeanfromottawa