Kim Fahner : Rebellion Box, by Hollay Ghadery

Rebellion Box, Hollay Ghadery
Radiant Press, 2023

 

 

 

 

Hollay Ghadery’s debut poetry collection, Rebellion Box, takes the shape of a poetic container that encapsulates so many wonderings. It includes posed questions—sometimes with unanswered responses—to thoughts around the social limitations that have been oppressively placed on gender, identity, motherhood, race, and even mortality and the passage of time itself. The poet wonders why the rich chaos of possibility has been erased in favour of more limiting forms.

Historically, rebellion boxes were carved by rebel prisoners in Upper Canada during the 1837 Rebellion. Ghadery’s title poem is a love poem written by Joseph Gould to Mary—the girl he loves—with letters sent from Joseph through to Mary’s mother. In the poem, Joseph says: “Tell Mary I think of her often. It can hurt/to think of myself like this: all stone and soot, but rest/assured my present circumstance is not finite.” Through his incarceration, he warmly recalls better times that were spent with Mary and her parents, clearing land for their farm. While incarcerated, Joseph writes about having been stung by some bees, but says that the very thought of Mary dressed in blue “was something else to think about” to distract him from the pain. He parallels it to his situation in prison, of being trapped and wanting to escape.

This notion, of finding beautiful things or memories to lift us up when we’re struggling in our lives, is found in several poems throughout the collection, but it is also the metaphor and symbol of the rebellion box that contains the wide and wonderful universe of Ghadery’s well-crafted poems. Here is a literary and poetic container into which a person can confide their worries, curiosities, and philosophical questions. Even if they are not answered, the questions—and their various potential answers—are kept safe inside the box from the start to the end of a person’s life.

Ghadery’s exploration of how a woman evolves as she ages is clearly established in the voice that is presented in Rebellion Box’s very first poem, “Postcard, Santa Maria,” in which the speaker considers how they have changed over time. To begin, there is the image of a young girl, “Stretched/to indifference,” and then there is a noticed evolution into adulthood as the speaker says, “I’m not that girl/anymore,” but who now is a mother of four children. In “Mom,” the speaker reflects on their changed identity, trying to sort out what they have morphed into, trying to find themselves in this new role as mother: “Coming and going/I’m all the same/to you. An/umbilical tug,” In “Psychomachia,” the searching for self continues: “I’ll never feel/like my old self again,” and “I can’t//picture a wall free of fingerprints,” leaving the speaker to reflect on their “milk-stained existence.” The aspects of what has traditionally defined them have changed.

A long poem with a strong, meditative tone, “Psychomachia” stretches out over a few pages, echoing the speaker’s journey to becoming a wife and mother, demonstrating the ways in which a child can be both a “black hole” as well as a bright spirit who is “blinking/sparks” and “slingshot/smiles,” speaking of the paradoxes of how women might evolve as they become mothers. Here is a contemplation of what it means to have achieved what was dreamt of—having children—but also having to then balance and renegotiate (or even rediscover) who the speaker has become over time. It’s a tricky balancing act on a highwire some days, this life, and there are references to how the speaker deals with their mental health and wellness challenges –as well as their evolving sense of identity--throughout the poems. How do you define yourself after you become a mother? Do you protect your inner sense of self, or accept and lean into this new being you’ve become once you’ve had children? How do you redefine yourself, and what do you do if you think you might have lost yourself in the process of transformation?

The thread of how we balance our lives in terms of mental health and wellbeing also runs through the collection. In “Cosmic Script,” a love poem between mother and daughter, the speaker references the idea that “darkness/is just the absence of light” and alludes to the wonder and beauty of comets: “Who knows where they go/Who knows what they see.//It could be anything,” ending with an acceptance of uncertainty in the phrasing “It’s okay not to know for sure.” In “Apeirophobia,” there is once again a reference to needing to find calm by accepting things and living in the moment: “you prefer/the past—it’s predictable, and/in it you have infinite life to live.” In “Runaway Universe,” the speaker asks the reader: “Do you realize, I wonder, what submerged/identities we women can have?” and suggests that the “restraints of civilization” stop us from exploring the universe’s possibilities. This sense of discordance dances through Rebellion Box and is the catalyst to get the reader thinking about how they relate to—but also connect with—the ways in which a woman’s life shapeshifts over time. We don’t notice it until we look back, long for the past, or think of how things have changed over the years.

Rebellion Box is a book of poems that both contains and protects things, broaching topics that are both difficult and challenging, but which also allows the poet—and the reader, by extension—to be vulnerable and open to poems that are raw, honest, and realistic. Ghadery also references the various wonders and ‘glimmers’ of the world—including babies and children—and aligns them with references that conjure evocative images of skies, stars, and weather patterns and systems. The poet, in creating this strong imagistic thread, uses her craft to lace the poems in Rebellion Box together in a cohesive way.

As we live it, life does not offer clearly laid out paths. Our initial intentions, so often imagined in our younger years, tend to shift as we gain experience. Looking back can lead to nostalgia, but it can also offer a growing awareness of beauty and wonder if we live more mindfully in today’s world. We continually try to figure out where we have come from, and who we have become through the process of living. There, in a woman’s journey of shapeshifting identity—Ghadery seems to be suggesting—is where the poetry and magic resides, if only we care to look closely enough to see it.  

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Ethan Vilu : Go, by Shelley A. Leedahl

Go, Shelley A. Leedahl
Radiant Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

It is a very difficult task to write honestly about loneliness. Accurately highlighted as “the other contemporary epidemic” on the back cover of Shelley A. Leedahl’s new collection, it is a phenomenon which can permeate the entirety of one’s life, but which can be almost impossible to meaningfully acknowledge. As such, Leedahl’s writing in Go deserves immense credit for speaking directly to her experiences, and for doing so in a way that is thorough, unflinching, alternately wry and earnest, and always generous and artful. It is this commitment to both forthrightness and poetic subtlety which makes Go such an enjoyable book.

Though there are many different narrative moments in Leedahl’s poetry, possessed with a wide variety of emotional tenors, I was perhaps most drawn to the beautiful spare quality of those lines where loneliness was confronted head-on:

Everything is exquisite
but once again, no plans for New Year’s Eve.

Getting to be a long time;
you’d like to hold anyone’s hand.

(from “Late December”)

With no artifice or embellishment, Leedahl captures both the pain of solitude and the complex feelings which can come from articulating that pain. These lines also serve to demonstrate the poet’s gift for strong, emphatic endings; they act as the closing couplets to a haunting poem of observation. I was particularly impressed by this facet of Leedahl’s writing in “Salema,” which ends a section of pieces on travel in Europe, and which has one of the strongest endings to a poem that I’ve encountered in some time. Yet another strength of Leedahl’s poetry lies in her capacity for imaginative, stark images; Go has the distinction of containing two of my new favorite sky-related lines (“Clouds smithereen, like dandelions.” from “Alberta Avenue,” and “The heavens have gone reptile.” from “Sunshine Coast Series”). Leedahl additionally displays a well-developed capacity for sonic playfulness throughout the collection, as in this small section from "Our Therapists Agree”:

stars sprayed like charms,
smoke-tangles and lake sweaters,
loon-songs endorsing the gloaming.

All of this is to say that Go is a thoroughly well-composed, well-rounded collection. Though this applies comprehensively in my view in terms of poetic style, I will confess that I had some personal difficulty with a small number of the pieces which focused primarily on feelings of hope and gratitude. There is a certain kind of poem, often taking the form of a list and making use of anaphora, which makes a case for hopefulness by highlighting many small, perhaps oft-overlooked beauties (my mind jumps to Jan Zwicky’s “You Must Believe in Spring” as a brilliant example). Though I am entirely sympathetic to the impetus behind these poems, I cannot help but find that they often ring somewhat hollow emotionally. Leedahl writes in a similar mode in such pieces as “What is Good,” “Let Us,” and “Ways to be Happier,” and while all possess fine images and expert pacing, I would certainly say that I did not enjoy them as much as other, more emotionally vulnerable elements of the text.

Whatever one’s reaction to the book’s various emotional resonances, it is certainly the case that Go is a fantastic book of poetry. It is stylistically varied and sonically adventurous, and it is resolute, courageous, and caring. In a society that is currently being scoured by loneliness, it is particularly impactful and timely. It is an admirable collection, and comes highly recommended.

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu is a poet and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their longsheet A Decision Re:Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020, and their poetry and reviews have been featured in a variety of outlets. Ethan currently serves as both poetry editor and circulation manager for filling Station. Their summer plans consist mainly of reading newspapers and playing Chaos Galaxy.

Ethan Vilu : Kitotam: He Speaks To It, by John McDonald

Kitotam: He Speaks To It, John McDonald
Radiant Press, 2021

 

 

 

 

As the reader is informed through the book’s back cover, the Neyhiyawak (Plains Cree) word “Kitotam” can be translated into English as “he speaks to it”. It is an elegantly fitting title for John McDonald’s new collection, whose direct, heartfelt poems form an excellent example of poetry-as-testament. Utilizing elegy, meditation, and narrative, McDonald chronicles his life with a keen eye and the utmost of care. Through this effort, the reader is brought to a particular state of awareness - there is both subtle beauty and immense injustice in this book, and both are conveyed in a manner of devastating clarity.

I do not at all wish to oversimplify the collection – there are also great moments of irreverence (as in “Adrian”, wherein McDonald castigates those who would make the same tired joke about his middle name) and potent reflections on artistry (particularly in “The Canvas”, a stand-out poem), among numerous other elements. I simply find myself drawn to the poet’s real capacity for capturing the ineffable moods of past eras of one’s life, in all their suffering and joy. The former is brought out in relentless fashion in “For Bernice” (itself a beautiful poem of tribute), wherein McDonald provides a list of brutal, unmerited judgements cast upon him and others: “We were Indians / Decimated and ignorant races not worth the welfare cheques”. The reader is left no room for equivocating, and is made to bear witness to the oppressive pain and difficulty which marked the poet’s experience as an urban Indigenous youth. The latter, that joy (often tinged with melancholy, as with all remembrance) is perfectly demonstrated in “Growing Up in PA” (i.e., Prince Albert, Saskatchewan), in a stanza that merits being quoted at length:

Those good times, few though they were
Young hellions run amok in the city
Raiding crabapple trees and chokecherry bushes
Riding stolen bikes down the sidewalks
Finding treasures in garbage cans and dragging them back home

This stanza – straightforward, conversational yet declarative, a little wistful – does a profoundly good job of capturing that vague feeling of looking back on adolescence. There are moments like this throughout Kitotam, and they create a stunning image of the poet’s life – a painting of incredible subtlety.

In terms of form, the work is characterized by frequent and masterful use of poetic repetition. This tendency is taken to an extreme in poems such as “Saskatchewan River Blues” (the opening piece in the text) and “The View”, both of which are list poems oriented around a repeated word or short phrase (“water” and “Look across”, respectively). Where I most enjoyed this emphasis on repeated language was in poems such as “My Grandfather’s Hands” and “Smoke”, which use modified repetition (often taking advantage of the reader’s anticipation) to produce strong poetic effects. Though much of the book is conversational in tone, there are engaging sonic moments at many points – as in “The grey boards brittle beneath / Summer suns and winter winds”, from “The Farmhouse”, or this graceful section from “On the Death of Mr. Dressup, September 2001”:

Cloaked in borrowed clothes and fables of old
From the Tickle Trunk
To the open souls of the young

McDonald’s unfailing, unfeigned concern for the people, events, and reflections which form the subject of his poetry is reflected at the level of structure. These are deeply enjoyable poems, both light and imbued with piercing lucidity.

There are many dimensions to the artistic work that John McDonald takes on in Kitotam, and all of them make crucial contributions to the quality of the text. The suffering, injustice, and resulting righteous indignation are fully tied in with the love, nostalgia, and profoundly expressed appreciation and mourning. It is the way that it is, I suppose, with any earnestly lived life, and therein lies Kitotam’s supreme accomplishment. This book is an account which is remarkable and beautiful in its fullness – a testament to which the reader will be grateful to have been able to bear witness.

 

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu is a student, writer, and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their poetry longsheet A Decisionre: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020. In addition to serving as the current managing editor for NōD Magazine, Ethan works as both circulation manager and as a member of the poetry collective at filling Station. Currently passionate about absurdism, memory, and the dying art of golf club forging, Ethan can always be found working on a series of interminable manuscripts.

Ethan Vilu : The Dry Valley, by Bernadette Wagner

The Dry Valley, Bernadette Wagner
Radiant Press, 2019

 

 

 

As a devotee of life on the prairies and foothills, I felt an instinctual gravitation towards Bernadette Wagner’s second book of poetry. The Dry Valley uses three distinct regions of Saskatchewan (the mixed grasslands in the southeastern corner of the province, the city of Regina, and the Qu’Appelle valley) as frameworks for intense meditations on self and other. In reflecting on the bare facts of her experience – on life with an alcoholic spouse, on the ambiguity of platonic, romantic, and sexual adoration and passion, on the complex colours of a lake scene – Wagner deals in the trials and quiet beauties that make up a human life. That she does this with skill, care, and above all a deeply held attentiveness is the underpinning of The Dry Valley’s quality.

As I made my way through the book, I was struck most immediately by the great physicality of the work. A great number of the poems in The Dry Valley are grounded in the author’s sensations and bodily experience – as in “Love Song for Emma'', where the poet speaks of “Heat on my brow, the nape of my neck, / tingling down my chest, my torso…”. This profound descriptive capacity carries over to others as well, as when (speaking of her spouse) Wagner writes in “Takeover”: “Your hands rise. / Crows’ feet thicken around your eyes. / Your cheeks bulge. / Your lips form a thin line.”. These incisive physical descriptions are impressive – this is not at all an easy thing to do, and commands an altogether different skill set compared to poetry which relies heavily on abstractions. It is indicative as well of a more general strength of the work (perhaps its ultimate strength), which is an intense capacity for unsparing, exact observation. Nowhere is this more evident than during “In the hour after”, which ends the book’s second section. A list poem whose powerful intensity can be attributed almost entirely to precise observation and recollection; it is an earnestly excellent piece which must be read in full in order to be experienced truthfully.

Though this attentiveness is sustained throughout the book, it is nonetheless the case that not every poem in The Dry Valley is this affecting. Many of the pieces are narrative vignettes of varying quality, though most of these are made whole in the end by that same expansive flow of detail (“Learning to Sew” is a prime example). My one genuine qualm revolves around “Playing it Smart”, which is the book’s opening piece. It is a narrative poem about a moment in childhood, and while one may presume that the experiences it describes were formative for Wagner, that quality of the event is not conveyed to the reader through the poem’s ultimately prosaic language. That this piece is given pride of place in an otherwise admirable book (being not only the first poem of the text, but also printed in full on the book’s back cover) will probably always mystify me. In the end, though, this is an issue which is more than overcome by the quality of many of the book’s other parts.

As a rigorous and unflinching account of a human life, The Dry Valley is both important and commendable. It is exact, generous, faithful to itself, and imbued with a true sense of place – I am not surprised to see my instinctual gravitation vindicated.

 

 

 

Ethan Vilu is a student, writer, and editor from Calgary, Alberta. Their poetry longsheet A Decision re: Zurich was published by The Blasted Tree in 2020. In addition to serving as the current managing editor for NōD Magazine, Ethan works as both circulation manager and as a member of the poetry collective at filling Station. Currently passionate about absurdism, memory, and the dying art of golf club forging, Ethan can always be found working on a series of interminable manuscripts.

Kim Fahner : footlights, by Pearl Pirie

footlights, Pearl Pirie
Radiant Press, 2020

 

 

 

          What always amazes me about reading Pearl Pirie’s work is her close attention to the poetic details that can weave themselves into the very fabric of a person’s life. In a western world where so many people seem to rush after elusive ‘promised lands,’ Pirie asks her reader to look more closely at the tiniest things that populate a day’s routine. There are pieces about poetry readings with cocky young poets who soak up praise, but then rudely leave before the ‘headliner’ reads. There is also a visit to a big chain bookstore in a frustrating search for independent poetry books in amidst the mass produced “100 Best Love Poems” anthologies that seem to populate shelves around the country.

There is a poem about a diva cup that frustratingly misbehaves, as well as a poem about an outing to a greenhouse to push a “trolley cart of ferns” that “squeaks on left turns.” Who hasn’t had a cart that squeaks, I wonder, and spoken to it with a scolding tone so that you can just get to the cash and go home with your purchases? Pirie’s sense of humour, wit, and intelligence is present through footlights. She is a master of exploring various poetic forms, so it’s always nice to see the way in which she has so carefully crafted and structured her collections.

          Here are lines that sing as you read them out loud, pulling you further and further into the cadence of Pirie’s work. The title of “let us make” slides seamlessly into the first line with “myths of ourselves instead of the usual/fools.” In “lifting for the purposes of night,” six beautiful couplets carve out vivid images and phrases:

                     the moon’s face is both up
                     and downwards.

                     in incandescence a
                     glossy-leafed houseplant

                     feels how the bottom
                     of an airplane wing

                     lifts, night sky slips
                     the room into bluer.

                     night suggests, anything
                     could happen.

                     a mosquito rides
                     the cross-ventilation.

This is a small poem that builds itself around texture, in how things feel to the touch, and in sight, and in the way even the tiniest mosquito hitches a ride on a current of air through a room. It is, I think, a poem that embodies all of what is best about Pearl Pirie’s work: she looks to—and documents—the tiny things in life with careful attention to detail. In so doing, she asks her reader to consider their place in the world, physically, spiritually, mentally, and philosophically.

          “in the park’s verges” is a love poem that feels organic, holistic, and raw. Pirie writes “you are a cosmos./you are bright as my insides,/as this swallowed sun of my entrails.” There are “missed spots/that need my lips. where I have touched glows.” In “all in,” the poet writes “prayer moves/nothing but//the warm mouth.” From there, lips are licked without thinking, a breath in “of cool-air words,//the sensation of a pre-kiss.” These are the sorts of moments in life that you don’t want to pass by with any great speed. If you’re lucky, the memories of such kisses should linger, but will also hopefully resonate in your physical body when they’re recalled and reimagined.

          With Pearl Pirie’s footlights, the reader moves through urban and rural spaces, to suss out and feel the difference between the two as the poet asks her reader to consider their own place within their life space(s). Here is a collection that speaks to resilience—in the face of the many struggles and challenges we all face as we make our way through our daily lives—and one that also speaks of grace, compassion, and gratitude.    

 

 

 

 

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