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.

Pearl Pirie : Waystation: On Rushing Dusk

 

 

 

 

I'm a completist about some poets (Monty Reid, Phil Hall, Donna Kane, Ross Gay, Jamie Sharpe, Nelson Ball, Kay Ryan, rob mclennan, Rae Armantrout, David Groulx, etc). I enjoy the internal consistency and the shifts. Each chapbook or book is a way station. I like the long game of following what a writer does next by the context they themselves create.

This leads me to consider my own root/route cause. Where I was, stuck at one point, I felt for Indiana Jones, Temple or Dooms(day), walls closing in.  I was compelled to shake off the medieval to 1800s landscape I was born into. I ran at anti-narrative, anti-meaning, sound, oblique jangle to refuse and to leave no room for the semantic defaults until I was safely clear. In retrospect, this was defensive. I had to induce a tectonic shift.

Poems were pushed out, like structural pillars pushed by Samson, to force the house to fall because so much cannot stand as was. Lines of anger that were a donkey's jawbone to slay old selves with. Informed in part by being nervous to well-gone-anxious, and overstimulated and in an urban clamour, jammed with unprocessed. This resulted, in part, in the manuscript Thirsts (Snare, 2011). Rushing Dusk does not come from the same captive house but miles beyond it.

I bent to surreal to reimagine the world, to take ownership of how I was to perceive, to give permission to play, and again, to refuse internalized givens and stretch beyond my usual range of motion. A certain amount of destruction of expectations needed to make room. A stanza, set aside for curative chaos.

Within a couple manuscripts of haiku, the constraints are cinched hard to the form, with different blinders on or microscope up. Eyes are still in freeze response, darting, averting, hyper-focusing. The poems can be more and will be but they may have to have been that range of mental motion first.

I read a meme somewhere that if a child is given no privacy, every thought they allow to form is for public consumption because they have no healthy boundaries or navigation skills. It might explain. It might not. Desire to connect with opaque word-shaped-poetry or with open-faced verse. A person needs down time, not all made for public consumption. Lines, lines, where to place.

With later manuscripts I tried to own up to my history, with a step to the side, doing haibun of my dad. And a manuscript that I got a grant for of understanding where my mom was coming for and our complex relationship. (Some bits of these are published.) This is an assessing and reframing of remains stage. This might be the practice of during panic attack to relax your brain stem response by looking around, behind you, moving your eyes and body.

All things are part of the whole travel. (Okay, clearly, yes, transparently, I'm avoiding honking the trope-horn of the word "journey".) The love poem suite, the health poem suite, the vector poems are gathering from past, to present to what-can-I-make-of-the-future. A bunch of these poems are looking for their poem-people in what comes out of my head.

Rushing Dusk is a rebuilding phase, and part of the same overall book-look of rain's small gestures (Apt. 9, 2022).

Some of these poems are more minimalist than others but they are trying to not bury the lede and amuse and distract and hop and point over-there and run away. It is allowing self to sit and permit myself to admit the profound and meaningful is possible without breaking faith with truths. They feel more tentative than frantic or frenetic.

They poems are feeling their way with their feet in dusk, more than feeling with hands and tripping fool-self in the dark, or in bright morning light on those tricky patches of smooth floor with shadows to stumble over.

These are poems after anxiety meds, after living in the countryside, while walking the woods, while sinking into slower sound, while having dealt with some shit. They are poems permitting metaphor and story back into the fold. The poems are more clear-eyed and vulnerable.

I'm walking at my own mortality instead of running away from it in these poems, conscious of how much life is a blink of the eye.

 

 

 

 

 

Pearl Pirie's fourth published trade poetry collection was footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures (Apt 9 Press, Sept 2021) is her chapbook of minimalist poems which won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize..

After decades in Ottawa, Pearl Pirie now lives in rural Quebec where she reads, reviews, carries stones and wood, builds and writes. She is a volunteer librarian for the Wakefield Public Library and a volunteer sorter at a thrift shop. She is on Instagram and Patreon. Her author site is www.pearlpirie.com

Pearl Pirie will be launching Rushing Dusk in Ottawa on August 10 as part of the above/ground press 31st anniversary reading, alongside Mahaila Smith, Gil McElroy, Chris Banks, Carlos A. Pittella and Shane Rhodes; tickets available here.

Sandra Ridley : “Make No Sudden Loves”: Cento for Pearl Pirie

from Report from the Pirie Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

 

This waiting hour had no beginning–a scratch of key at the lock. Cold air flushes thru–
until fatigue bangles the bones.

The ironies continued–because I love you. If I didn’t, think–crisis isn’t part of all
episodes–until it becomes a wince.

I am, you are, & we conjugate ourselves into–its derivation with enough time–
blotches out steadiness, leaves voice winded.

Think of me as a hoarse whisperer, patient to a fault–instances will persist
for some–sense is as sense does. Sense is as sense is made.

Resilience will be the restructuring of re-silence–to burn it to ashes
in our mouths–snow. Hiccupping & hip-downing, it sits, hics.

Grief. Being in grief is a kind of–for its necessity, trying.

Towards the light & shallows–confounding–
(sp) urn this (c)rushing onslaught.

It won’t do any harm.

 

 

 

 

 

All phrases lifted from the first section of Pirie’s The Pet Radish, Shrunken.

 

 

 

Sandra Ridley lives and writes in Ottawa, near the Kichi Sibi, on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg people.