Forty-five Ottawa poets : Pearl Pirie : Two poems

folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets

 

 

memento vivis 

“The fly that lives a single day
Has lived as long as we.”
T. S. Eliot

 

lifetimes are an elastic measure
as pleasure can cover both loose and bound 

where are my glasses?looking down
they fall from crown to nose, oh 

with excited interjection he crows
this next poem is true! it really happened 

verse is a common-place book
but higher in commentary 

the footnoted (s)creed,
a scroll of a dot matrix printer 

how M. received it with
dismissive brow, declared “not poetry” 

close as a kite to a kitten
or a butte, to butter 

the ritual scarification
that is reading and writing 

do we conflate the actual
with credence of derivative dreams 

eating five fluffy sticky cinnamon
buns and five brownie sundaes 

each taste is the same as first
this is how we know our sleep 

magicking her general store, wave
a second floor, round windows, inventory, crowd 

and us chasing the runaway calf
back to the bookstore 

truck tracks, broken honeycombs
of snow, the honey road home 

honeycones and pinecombs
my mother always said 

when she had reason to speak
of them or the Specific Ocean 

what we retain and why, clod
of broken cement for defence 

we exist, we exist. is it enough
to persist, to simply not entirely fail 

an earthquake scavenger, driven
by what is useful not indulging in souvenirs 

we must be economic about
what we carry, or else hurt ourselves.

  

 

a placebo science

kitten, think your way out of this wet 
paper sack, wrenched shoulder 

pious adventist straightjacket that
press painkillers out of reach  

playing monkey in the middle
but the toque, the torque is hope. 

a thrum of place in usual
midnight perch in tree crotch 

is sissy derived from sister?
the worst insults are true but twisted. 

dad’s story of how Whey’s Corner was
named fades. what falls by the wayside, whey.  

yesterday’s bread is 
motivation enough. 

concluding too soon is how 
you miss little aggregating truths. 

homeopathic soap? it suds no dishes.
a Baptist immersion of cups. 

cheesecloth straining. control groups
of devout vs cultural christians 

pop quiz: the names of the disciples.
countered: list all the green species here. 

all the protestant family trees.
collecting cheese labels is "tyrosemiophilia” 

at least there was noon space 
to think when amply alone. a cedar grove.

wait for prayer’s answer
to be a no. a thousand times no. 

antagonizing uncles: “minds
so open their brains fell out” 

their point was never to teach 
brains but bait emotions, the bullies. 

thus my mistrust of adverbs,
scripts and sentimental poems  

a child’s reflex for autonomy:
don’t you guilt me in how to feel  

the effects of feeling are lasting 
and corrupt as a kick-backs 

gravity is pulling at the skirts of the curd
the curd is resisting the cloth. separation.  

such expository is like suppository
but more awkward and painful 

hey, what do you sense against
your neck? is it ghost breath?  

is the pinch of your shoulder
from a sling or a cramped wing opening?

 

 

 

I am re-reading Stilt Jack and the tendency towards couplets strengthens. The idea of link and shift inherent in haiku and renga seems to fit somehow, a tenuous link. Tension, intention, chaos and unconscious oblique links. I am aiming to permit emotions and deep past in for overdue processing and integration with now. And as ever to allow hope and humour.

 

 

 

 

Pearl Pirie’s latest will be in Al-Manach des Collines, an anthology of Gatineau Hills writing and in The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku in February 2025. She is an English book reviews co-editor of Haiku Canada Review and the coordinator of the Betty Drevniok Haiku Award. Recently: Heat Lamp (above/ground press, Dec 2025), We Astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, Spring 2025), and from phafours press: Crime and Ornament by Tamsyn Farr (Nov 2025).

 

Pearl Pirie : My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, by Misha Solomon

My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, Misha Solomon
Brick Books, 2026

 

 

How is it 5 years since Misha did a weekly email list of Some Gay Poems? Do you remember, “they hanged Haman and the cookies are delicious” which ran in part,

"this week I made Hamantaschen
with a homemade apricot filling
I’ve never made them before but it seems
as good a time as any to celebrate survival

[…]

Hamantaschen are cookies named for Haman, a vizier in the Persian empire who sought to kill all the Jews, but was thwarted because King Ahasuerus really loved his wife Esther, who revealed herself to be Jewish

this week I watched a TV show about gay men
dying in a different time of a different ongoing pandemic
but there aren’t commemorative cookies
for that near-extinction event […]”

There’s an irreverence and engagement bubbling that refuses to be confined in stodgy inert boxes. His writing zags unexpectedly but not erratically as the poems travel and spiral overlapping but new paths. 

I looked forward to Mondays for a while, with that going. It was a aCovid project with lively, quirky meditations of shut-in life. “Medieval Sleep” when we typically did two units of sleep each night, 

“we modern folk have
lost so much. We never share
a mid-sleep mead with those
we love and our phones are
always low on charge.”

(He ran it at least 22 weeks according to emails I kept.) 

Misha is coming to VERSeFest Thursday March 26. https://www.verseottawa.ca/en/performer/mishasolomon

One of his poems from his book was already scooped up into The Best Canadian Poetry 2025 (“Yoo-Hoo”. p 130 of BCP). It’s casual and yet somehow simultaneously... slaying? How? What did he do there. He’s very good at counterbalancing tones. Technique and heart. 

I sit here waiting for My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet by Misha Solomon (Brick, 2026) to drop on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m crious because of how his mind works, what he’ll do in new poems and because he’s looking at family history that has scant records, being in much the same position that i’m in doing my poems of family history. . 

It’s like proof of principal of what Derek Beaulieu said in Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the Twenty-first Century (Assembly Press, 2026). Give your work away and people will have access and want to buy it. It doesn’t prevent commercial sales to share. 

[It’s here. Eeee.]

So far, me likey. 

A piece of documentation of his great-grandfather’s life. The erasure poem included of his own grant application for the project is delightfully meta.  Some like Sacha Archer or Puddles of Sky might make. Seems I like poetry both concrete and conceptual. When there are stories there’s a travel, an associative semantic drift I admire, as the poems I quoted above. 

He isn’t afraid of the earnest (“we both know that you can wear us like a shawl, take us off when you feel too warm” p. 41), nor of the absurd or silly (“a fun hame for a gnat//would be to catch smoke in /a tiny net” p. 33). It’s all game. It’s all good. 

The characteristics of slide and play, insight and humour, casual tone and grounding in details of domestic gay life that I mentioned earlier, all apply to this book too. An engaging read.

The only thing I’m not sure about is the typefaces. Choices were made. The historical threads are in a seriffed typeface, Benton Modern Display. It is hard to read on screen (maybe better on paper) with its high variability of strokes between stem and bowl and bar, and large line spacing. Maybe it works to slow down reading as the writing is more pragmatic and cautious. It doesn’t need to be flagged that way. The contemporary text in non-serifed Calluna Sans font is easy to read. (I seem to have trouble with visual reading needing brighter light and enlarged text to be comfortable these days.)

(Ah, spoke too soon. The pattern breaks. The font assigned to each speaker switches place.)

That there is these two streams is a fabulous juxtaposition. The covert queer life of a century ago, longing, lowdown vs the cultural icon “Queen in up at straight events[…]Be the faggot they want you to be” (p. 47). It feels like a novel in the sense of English use marked in every sense made by two distinct characters. 

You ever read a book you’re enjoying then, turn aghast, want to close the book in hide it because otherwise you’ll read it all too fast and be done? Yeah, that. 

Maybe I can delay gratification or reading overload by making the chocolate mug cake he shares as poem as instructions. It’s quite different than my lava cake go-to. 

Maybe I should leave off the review and leave it to you to discover. 

I don’t. I can’t yet. I read on. Some profanity of awe may have ensued. The dog isn’t telling.

Misha can travel that distance between entertaining and vulnerable by turns that palpitate the heart. Grounded, then leaping, which I suppose enacts the ballet dancing grandfather. 

If you haven’t had the pleasure you should read this, or see him at VERSeFest.

If you are on Brick’s list you know, you can buy it from them directly, paper or digital or from booksellers.ca or at VERSeFest in paper, or Perfect Books later, once they restock after VERSeFest. I do hope they’ll sell out as they should.

 

 

 

 

Pearl Pirie is in Hills' Almanach des Collines, an anthology of spec fiction in the Gatineau Hills as well as in Turtle Dreams (Red Moon Press) and forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Talking About Strawberries All the Time and Kingfisher. She is an English book reviews co-editor of Haiku Canada Review and Shohyōran. Recent chapbooks: Heat Lamp (above/ground press, Dec 2025), and We Astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, Spring 2025). She edits for phafours press, including Crime and Ornament by Tamsyn Farr (Nov 2025). www.pearlpirie.com

Pearl Pirie : Elegy for Opportunity, by Natalie Lim

Elegy for Opportunity, Natalie Lim
Wolsak & Wynn, 2025

 

 

 

I do like a poetry collection that prompts m to learn. On entering Elegy for Opportunity by Natalie Lim (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) I didn't catch that Opportunity was a very specific one, the Mars rover active from 2004 to 2018. I could compare the narrator point of view to Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2025) in that the narrator of that novel was relating her emotional energies to a robot world far away in time and space, while Lim's poetry similarly looks out to Mars and a robot as a companion. Whereas Opportunity sent back over a 1000 reports, Lim shares 44 poems with a connecting thread of the little rover that could, an anchoring key. The rover is emblematic of the planet itself with time available ticking away. The rover acts as a counterpoint to our option on earth to build each other up instead of being cut-off from both good and bad. She sets her mind to sorting what is worth keeping, small not-ornamental beauties but moments that make people worth saving.

I don't know the composition of all the poems but they feel like Covid lockdown poems in that they centre around isolation and secondary experiences, like movies, twitter, Spotify, and a video game while the remarked on "unreal" is crickets in a park. Even winter cold is an abstract that becomes a marked form of being. There are musing of dating and dogs, gratitude for a partner who looks after her when not feeling well.

The central idea of Opportunity (and opportunity) act as a tether to hope and love so we don't float off in the deadening polluted waters of information floods. When the world is hard, resistance must cultivate its tenderness. As Tennessee Williams said, "with age comes the realization that nothing is as erotic, attractive, rare or calming as kindness." It is not an automatic given. (p. 9) "I know so much more about tenderness /than I used to. my hands are learning to be kinder,/ reaching for yours across the table, squeezing once/ to remind you that this is all real." Later she returns (p. 50) "I learned tenderness/from the girl across the bar/who didn't know me/but asked if I was okay."

The phrasings throughout are loose and casual, as if confidential to a friend. Spoiler alert: in her title poem Elegy for Opportunity, (p. 11) she reflects how one can be tender and still that not cancelling out the cruelty of what we set in motion for destruction. Hers, a variation on saying sorry doesn't un-break the cup. There's a melancholy to isolation on another world with no means to communicate or return. She does not unpack these things explicitly but leaves that to the reader.

The poems are tender shoots, tentative yet pressing. Many of the poems are snippets such as "Inside Out Made Me Cry This Week". I know I watched the movie but I retained nothing, nonetheless the main thrust is explicit enough to come through. In it she observes "what an odd thing, to know everything about yourself/ and still be on your own side."

It is marvellous how a poet in her 20s is confident enough to put her poetry in public discourse, to stand up and be counted as a poet, to share what she sees from where she stands. "I should not treat poems like subtweets" (p. 4) makes no concession for older paper people who I've seen complain about digital terms. All life is appropriate for tipping into poetry.

 

 

 

 

Pearl Pirie works on manuscripts in parallel while she lives quietly in Quebec with her loudest part being her laughter, she's told. www.pearlpirie.com Watch for her Pinhole Press chapbook this spring.