Kim Fahner : Knife on Snow, by Alice Major

Knife on Snow, Alice Major
Turnstone Press, 2023

 

 

 

 

 

Alice Major’s latest poetic offering begins with “End times 1: Record of pressure,” a poem that reflects on how her body has felt pressure as it has grown older, how there are “plate techtonics of aging.” She writes of her physical body as a parallel to the earth’s body, making reference to “my thinning crust,” and documenting her hips as “now misaligned plates/like cratons, sections/of ancient basement rock/stable over ages, while tendons/rift and rip around them.” The parallel is clear: there is a physical record of change—of pressure—and of “a slow,/continuous apocalypse.” This poem locates the poet (and reader) as being fallibly and undeniably human. What follows, to begin Knife on Snow, is the sadly prescient “A fate for fire,” which feels as if it is speaking specifically to the horror that is the summer of 2023, but which was written after the Fort McMurray fire of 2016.

The nine-part piece, “A fate for fire,” is a powerful opening poetic sequence. Dawn arrives as a dragon torn straight out of Beowulf, dragging “its grey tail/from sky’s flat surface  and citizens woke/to no blue summer.” Here is a poem with images that haunt the reader. There are people with “burning eyes” as well as “fume-drugged highways,” as “continents consume themselves.” Trees “are torches,  terrible angels,/crests of flame,” devouring trees, but also creatures whose “corpses lie/chase-victims,  charred in smoke.” Around the city, “gripped/in the fist of forest,” large projects have destroyed the Boreal “down to its bones,” and “where forest crowds   construction camps/and paycheques float  on pipelines’ fates.” This was the fire that is still referred to as “The Beast,” forcing ninety thousand residents to flee, “the long road   logjammed/with crawling trucks,   creeping cars.” One road out.

Major moves from Fort McMurray to the landscape and geography of Iceland, a “fire-formed land,   lava-layered,/where Earth’s plates pull  at the planet’s crust.” Tourists—ten million a year—move through Iceland’s Keflavik Airport, and the poet takes note of the fact that “the birds’ road     roars with metal,/soot and particulates,   unlocked sulfates,/high-sky contrails.” It seems we humans can only ever think of ourselves, too often not realizing that “our fates are bound/by actions of others    wanting only/to save their skins.” Where to go, the poet asks the reader? From Alberta to Iceland? Then where to? “Fire keeps coming  closer to home/in the warming world.” From here, where I sit and write on an early July morning in Northern Ontario, more than a few days through late June have been days where breathing outside, where walking outside, is almost impossible. That smoke comes from fires in Quebec and Northern Ontario, and it feels as if the world is on fire. Alice Major captures that overwhelming sense of sad inevitability in “A fate for fire.”

In “Knife on Snow,” again a sequence of poems, the poet wonders how a knife has been thrown into a yard full of snow. Has it been thrown down from the heavens? Major suggests the ways in which humans have historically always been at odds with one another, how countries have destroyed other countries to colonize them, and how humans “always seek for portents/in the changing patterns of heaven.” There are thousands of landscapes that have been “claimed, colonized,/borders blurred by blood and burnings, blasts/of man-made armament, tanks massed,/rifle barrels and barrel chests/and borrowed time. Weapons rain,/the sky grows deadly.” The result is that “All war is civil war,/internal to ourselves.” The question is how do we stop ourselves from ruining ourselves and, more importantly, from ruining the planet for future generations?

It would be strange not to address the ways in which the world has changed in the recent pandemic years, how people have become less and less tolerant in so many cases. Major writes a series of poems that focus on anger and on how anger grows and spills over into the world in an unchecked manner. In “Paths integral,” she writes “Where do we/locate the sullen burn of grudge?” and “Where is that/ narrow territory where unnecessary rage roars up when I’m/hurt by something as minor as a stubbed toe?” In “Anger’s arithmetic,” she ponders the ways in which one person “shouting on the corner is a man/haunted by some demon” can morph into “nineteen people might become a mob/primed to lynch.” In “Alarums and excursions,” Major writes of how “now voices rise   uncivil   shouts/disorderly noise   from a nearby street/urgent fragments   profanity/indistinguishable angers    breaking out/in emergency    break glass.” Then, in “Immune response,” she writes of random Zoom bombers who enter virtual rooms to spread racism: “Anger’s/inflammatory response takes down the whole organism.” In the face of the pandemic and the climate crisis, dovetailing tellingly as they did, poems like “Progressive” also speak of how taking a stand for the environment and community can now be a firestarter of its own sort.  

Alice Major’s Knife on Snow is a call to awareness and hope in so many ways. In “Tales of the apocalypse,” she states honestly: “we know we’ve launched this ship ourselves.” So many of us have become “accidental gods,” though, somehow believing that we are above the natural world when we are actually part of it. Forgetting that interwoven aspect of life on earth is egocentric and narrow-minded. Some kind of world will last, she tells us, but what will remain? As if to offer a possible notion, the last section of the collection is titled “Travels in the solar system.” A beautifully crafted series of haibun poems that end with reflections on our self-centredness: “Morning. Social media/the first light we turn to./Brain chemistry changes.” and “One more item ticked/off the bucket list. What to post next/on the photo feed?” Perhaps not much will remain after we disappear, as we’ve become so solipsistic as a society. Perhaps we ought to learn from the natural world before it’s too late.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the First Vice-Chair of 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 Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : Endlings, by Joanna Lilley

Endlings, Joanna Lilley
Turnstone Press: 2022

 

 

 

 

Joanna Lilley’s Endlings is a collection of poems about extinct animals. The word “endlings,” Lilley writes in a preface to the book, “means the last individual or species or sub-species. It has not yet been included in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is probably only a matter of time.” That last sentence is sufficiently damning and should cause a shiver of unrest to move up your spine. That’s the effect that’s intended, especially as you read through poems that range from reflections on the St. Helena earwig, the speckled cormorant, and then as far back to the cave bear and Centrosaurus. Extinction isn’t a new thing, but it’s one that we humans have recently caused to accelerate by our own hands. That makes it even more unsettling, to think that we have yet to learn that, when a species goes, it doesn’t come back. Our thoughtlessness is stunning and self-centred.

In “Crossing,” Lilley alludes to the human tendency to colonize whatever it comes across in its various settlements and migrations over thousands of years. She writes of how humans crossed the oceans, “luring out/huge creatures we’d never seen before/in order to kill and eat them.” She writes of the Procoptodon goliah, a giant kangaroo that is now extinct, a creature that only lives on in “Dream Time now—/the human gift of everlasting life.” In “Thawings,” the poet considers the extinction of the Steppe bison, with each stanza documenting the discovery of the skeletons of ancient creatures that have been embedded in riverbanks for thousands of years. The scientists who come to dig them up cut “a chunk of flesh from a defrosted /mummy’s neck in a laboratory.” They then “diced and simmered it/in a pot with stock and vegetables./They made a Pleistocene stew/and ate it.” Everything humans do, Lilley reminds us of our historic bad behaviour in this collection, has to do with thoughtless consumption. A species goes extinct, without humans even knowing, and no one seems to blink. Ignorance is not bliss, though, and Endlings documents the litany of loss in the natural world.

Beyond the dinosaurs, Lilley also writes poems about creatures that we might find more familiar in our lifetimes. In “They Bring it on Themselves,” she writes about polar bears that “may endanger humans as climate changes,” and how humans killed “the wolf at the dump” because “it didn’t show any fear of humans.”  The poet asks us to consider how we, as humans, cause changes in the environment that negatively affect various creatures. Where are humans? At the top of the food chain. That doesn’t mean, Lilley reminds her readers, that we are exempt from evaluating our own poor behaviour and then—hopefully—readjusting it for the good of the natural world.

In “Desert Fish,” Lilley raises awareness about global warming and the shift in temperatures of rivers, lakes, and oceans around the world. “Water warms…heats, overheats/the cyan pupfish eating/hot blue-green algae.” In the Amargosa River hot springs, “enlarged, diverted, merged,” some “olive-brown fish/float/swelling to rot,//dying for another species’ bathhouse wallow.” In “Takapourewa Wren,” Lilley focuses on the Stephens Island wren, and writes about a lighthouse keeper who “might decide to store the bird/in spirits in a jar/to show the collectors when/they come from lands afar.” The poet writes truthfully, saying “men will collect,” reminding her readers that the human tendency to collect, categorize, and catalogue species that are endangered or extinct is not always an admirable one. Humans collect to memorialize the lost creatures, but do we take notice of our poor behaviour and readjust so that other species are saved rather than lost to the mists of time?

As Joanna Lilley writes in the acknowledgements, “extinction is taking place probably between one thousand and ten thousand times more rapidly because of the actions of Homo sapiens. We are living through Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, and we are the ones causing it.” This is not something to be proud of, most certainly, and Endlings is a call to arms, a sharp nudge with an elbow in the ribs to wake up, and a warning to take heed of how humans have caused such damage to the global environment over thousands of years. Do we just chalk it up to poor human behaviour, and ignore the litany of losses, or do we try and redeem some shred of hope for the future of the natural world and its creatures? Well-researched and thoroughly interesting, Endlings is especially interesting for anyone who reads or writes eco-poetry. It would be good, too, for poems in this collection to find their way into Canadian elementary and secondary classrooms in a time when our future depends on the youth of this generation to be so much wiser than their elders ever were.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her new book of poems, Emptying the Ocean, is being released by Frontenac House in October. She’s a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Representative of The Writers’ Union of Canada (2020-24), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : Cattail Skyline, by Joanne Epp

Cattail Skyline, Joanne Epp
Turnstone Press, 2021

 

 

 

 

If you’ve been to the prairie provinces, then you’ve likely fallen in love with the fields and the sky—with the vast, open spaces that make you feel humble and quiet inside. If you read Joanne Epp’s Cattail Skyline, you’ll begin to think—again, likely—of how landscape and place form and transform us. Epp’s poems take the reader from the open spaces of the prairie to memories of a 1994 trip to Cambodia, and then even into Ontario on a train trip. The numbered “Cemetery road” poems lace themselves through the collection, as one of the key motifs of journeys—by foot, car, plane, and rail—is explored by the poet.

The first poem in the Cattail Skyline, “Cemetery road 1,” invites the reader in, makes them long for a wild road trip without a specific destination in mind. Epp writes: “A crow call. Open space and a road. Not just any road,/but this one leaving the little town where you went to/high school, where you still come every summer.” In this first piece, the poet establishes the idea of how people tend to return to their earliest origin places, traveling back to first homes and towns with a mix of excitement and dread, wondering how those places might have transformed themselves over the years. 

Hers is a poetry that is observational and full of keen descriptive detail. In “Lanigan Creek,” Epp writes: “Swaying on cattails, the blackbirds--/yellow-headed, red-winged—see it all.” In “Image in a country church,” the first line sings: “Sunday, white clapboard unbearably bright.” Here is a little church, in Horse Lake, Saskatchewan, where glory is “declared/in morning rays through arched windows,/shining the varnished pews.” In the “Omand’s Creek” series of poems, the poet writes a poem for each month of the year, letting the reader experience how the landscape of the creek shapeshifts through the seasons. There are warblers, mourning doves, maples, sparrows, catfish, and footbridges. It’s refreshing to be able to sink into these twelve calendar poems, taking into consideration whether humans do enough to mind those wilder spaces. In “Alert (March),” she writes: “You, too, watch for signs/of what’s coming. You listen hard/for the sound of meltwater, wait to be told/how to love the world.” Reading Cattail Skyline reminds you of how to look very closely, mindfully, and then asks you to consider your place—in your life and in the world.

The Cambodia poems, cushioned in the centre of the book, are just as detailed as the Canadian prairie ones. In “Breathless,” Epp speaks of the culture shock that comes with visiting a new country: “…knowing coconuts grow/on trees is not the same/as tipping a fresh one to your mouth/and drinking its sweet juice.” There are girls who hold bowls full of flower petals, heat that makes a person wilt, “three broken Buddhas,” a temple where there are old nuns and monks “in orange-yellow robes,” and a length of vibrant silk that is “sapphire blue shot with purple.” There’s a different kind of vibrancy here, in contrast to the imagery of the Canadian prairies, but the same careful attention to detail and senses in the imagery.

The notion of travel, and of coming and going, but also of practicing how to be still and observant is a through line in the book. In “Here,” the poet writes of her family history, in terms of how it is fixed to a specific place: “This is the tamarack we planted./These are the spaces in our midst./This is where we gather in the evenings.” The train poems clustered together in “Thirty Day Pass” let the reader escape a bit, travel alongside the poet. There are images of trees and lakes that “flow through our sleep,” place names that pass by with quick shutter clicks, and sleep that will only come after midnight when “fields give way to forest, when the chain/of moonlight breaks.” Hardly wanting to miss a minute of watching what passes by outside the train window, Epp speaks, too, of how what happens inside a train—while watching and meeting new people—is transformative. In “Chance,” the scent of bergamot in Earl Grey tea is a nudge to think of how life’s experiences often slip “into memory’s inner pocket, where only chance/could find them.” So much of Cattail Skyline is about how place, memory, history, and being mindfully present in each moment is valuable.   

The poems of the prairies, though, are the ones that—for someone like me, who has grown up in Northern Ontario—seem especially evocative. Maybe that’s just because any new landscape is exotic and something new to explore, but I found the expanses inside the poems—of sky and fields and long prairie roads and life—made me think of how we travel back to our home places in so many different ways. Joanne Epp’s Cattail Skyline is a collection that sings of the beauty of the prairies, and of how memory and nostalgia is tied to landscape, and of how poetry can root itself firmly in all of these things.

 

 

 

 

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

rob mclennan : The Bestiary, cold-press moon and The Muse Sings, by Dennis Cooley

Dennis Cooley, The Bestiary
Turnstone Press, 2020

Dennis Cooley, cold-press moon
Turnstone Press, 2020

Dennis Cooley, The Muse Sings
At Bay Press, 2020

 

 

 

I know it isn’t impossible for a poet to publish three books in the same calendar year, but there aren’t many who see three poetry titles appear in the same season, let alone two with the same publisher. Winnipeg poet, editor, critic and teacher Dennis Cooley’s work has long been expansive, exhaustive and far-reaching, stretching across years and manuscript pages, and the second half of 2020 saw the publication of his collection of poems around prairie beasts, his collection of pieces reworking myths, fables and well-familiar stories, and his collection of poems around the idea of the muse. Cooley is a poet in constant motion, yet one that also doesn’t seem to publish much in journals, especially given how much he has produced. Cooley is infamous for working on books for years, extending poetry manuscripts some six to eight hundred pages in length, before excerpting threads for potential book publication, and simply to look in the acknowledgements of each of these collections, spare as they are, is to begin to understand the length and breadth of some of these works. For example: one of the first Cooley titles I picked up upon arriving in Winnipeg in 1997 was goldfinger (Winnipeg, MB: Staccato Chapbooks, 1995), a chapbook of prose poems reworking fairy tales, a collection that is woven into cold-press moon. Until now, goldfinger did seem as an odd self-contained prose outlier, set as a cornerstone of this particular collection. One of but a small handful of credits for The Bestiary includes STANZAS magazine, my long-shuttered long poem journal, as he appeared as issue #45 back in April 2006. The Bestiary also includes a credit from his correction line (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Press, 2008), potentially extending a particular thread from that earlier collection. It has become clear that to see any small work by Cooley out into the world is to suspect that there might be a full-length manuscript he’s sitting on that will eventually emerge, even if that might take some twenty or thirty years. He might be in constant motion, but he also doesn’t seem to be in any particular hurry. In this way, there possibly isn’t anyone else working in the way Dennis Cooley works on poems or poetry manuscripts. Stretching an idea into multiple, accumulative poems that is then carved down, or even selected, into a full-length collection. How, then, is the through-line of any Dennis Cooley poetry collection determined?

The Bestiary is exactly what one might suspect it is, a collection of poems on prairie beasts. Set into themed sections—“‘A Prairie Boy’s Eden’,” “THE FROGS,” “THE CROW,” “THE SPIDER,” “ARKOLOGY” and “THE BIRDS”—Cooley composes a lyric in constant motion, play and wit and bad jokes, a lyric that refuses stillness; even while describing stillness, merely a pause before the poem turns, and darts away. “an old hen   /barred / rock they called Hetty,” he writes, to open the poem “Hetty,” “Ms. Hen Rietta Lamour / and she was slow and lame // also dingy among / the persnickety birds / the hennaed chickens / that mince & fluff / in near disdain pick over the jewels [.]” Exploring his list of prairie beasts and childhood attentions and recollections, his lines bounce across pun and play, allowing the motion of language to propel where it might next land, bouncing off an idea or a fragment or a word stepping forth. The poems in The Bestiary are securely placed, set in prairie locale and language, among the sounds and stretched-out silences of the long prairie grasses and ahems, the patters of Cooley’s speech. “ttsskk tskk a grim taskmaster,” he writes, as part of the poem “is a victorian schoolmater,” “brisks to the ledge / one swift pass / sideswipes winter / / swipes the board clean [.]”

crow creates earth

scans the mud
she will call earth
wherever she spits
saliva glistens & pockmarks

crow watches the caribbean turn electric blue
tilts on her toes tints the days vermillion
smears them in chartreuse in cyan in rust
fills in cobalt & ochre indigo & goldenrod
adds woad & madder slate & ruby
daubs cadmium & manganese blue in burnt umber

in the coal-blue cold crow compresses until
her heart becomes so clear it cannot be
          marked & will not break
          gulps the raw new light
          flings the stars over her shoulder
          pins them onto the pewter moon

          cries out when she turns
          back hears the spinning
          gasps when she sees the blue
          & white world for the first time
          so bright & wetly shining

Cooley takes an idea and runs with it, writing out any and every possible thing, exhausting every facet, ever play and pun through poems, eventually compiling and excising the excess into serviceable book-length form. My impression is that Cooley doesn’t build up into a book as much as pare down, pulling out from the larger structure the threads that make up individual book-length structures. One could think of his work-in-progress, “love in a dry land,” a collection first referenced through poems appearing in his Sunfall: new and selected poems (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1996) as well as in “the Dennis Cooley issue” of Prairie Fire magazine in 1998, a series of poems based on Sinclair Ross’s first novel, As For Me and My House (1941), composed from the point of view of the character of Mrs. Bentley. To date, the manuscript appears to have emerged not only as The Bentleys (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006), but of the collection published prior to that, Country Music: New Poems (Vernon BC: Kalamalka Press, 2004). Might there be further collections that emerge from that particular manuscript?

The ways in which Cooley constructs a book around a subject or idea does seem a bit more expansive than in previous collections, but that could easily be something that has developed over his decades of book-making, from his long poem about his late father, Fielding (Thistledown Press, 1983), writing outer space and astronauts in This Only Home (Turnstone Press, 1992), writing his late mother through the poems in Irene (Turnstone Press, 2000), Bram Stoker’s Dracula and other vampire tales in seeing red (Turnstone Press, 2003) or the physical bones and lines of the prairie in the stones (Turnstone Press, 2013). And of course, there was his expansive writing and reworking of the histories and legends of Manitoba outlaw John Krafchenko in Bloody Jack (Turnstone Press, 1984; University of Alberta Press, 2002), a collection influenced, in part, through his experience with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (House of Anansi Press, 1970). Bloody Jack is also a book that Cooley famously reworked and rewrote for the updated edition with University of Alberta Press, including returning a number of pieces and pages originally removed by editor David Arnason from the original publication (the difference between the 138 pages of the first edition, and the 280 pages of the second).

a lyric moon
clear as acrylic

the stepmother moves like wasps wraps the children in
wire ties up the tongues she warps and ensnares them
they can hardly walk barely talk their father does not
know what they say they are mute fall down without
reason the father tries to warn them warm them with
his voice she is taking away the words taking them
under her spell children children speak to me the father
is nearly worn out fears she will draw them in they will
stumble back into infancy into the forests dead to the
father and he pleads for them come back come back to the
house where their stories are stacked like blankets they
can wrap around themselves but now they drag animal
shouts through their throats under the big O that rolls
overhead in circles and circe howls

          Asks of frogs in spandex swimsuits
          they snap at their waists
          proud of their wars and waterlines.
          Dunno, dunno.

Nope, no kids round these parts mister. Yustabe but no
kids no more. Nope. (“THE FOREST,” cold-press moon)

cold-press moon works through well-familiar European stories and fables to classic monsters, writing stepmothers, Hansel and Gretel, The Brothers Grimm, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As the end of “The Forest” writes: “he hollows out a space in his heart for the words his chil- / dren carry in their pockets to warm all the stories they / ever heard or told [.]”

Cooley has a way of arriving at the bare bones of a story, of an idea, writing landscape or folk tales of lost children and stepmothers, and what moves out beyond the shadows. He even includes a sly reference to his friend, David Arnason, who wrote out two volumes, subtitled “fractured prairie tales,” of own short stories reworking fables and myths, both of which appeared through Turnstone Press: The Dragon And The Dry Goods Princess (1994) and If Pigs Could Fly (1995). As part of the piece “THE FATHER CONFERS WITH THE QUEEN,” a poem composed as part of a stretch of lyrics around the fable of the princess and the frog, Cooley writes out the queen, who speaks: “No, I simply will not hear this. That wonderful / Mr. Arnason know who knows all about these things from his / days at Gimli says he’s quite remarkable at the pool, a fine / young swimmer. A natural. And that is the end of it. I / will not hear another word.” There is something so compelling in the way his poems push, propelled by sound, ideas and image, endlessly pushing alternates and versions, such as the poem “GARRISON MENTALITY,” the first poem of the section “Rapunzel,” that begins: “awful the way you keep me // waiting why lady chat / elaine why do you do this / you into your curds & why // i send my feathered love / the shafts of light shift & sing / they ring & splinter against / your bedroom door [.]” Cooley writes so much around the core of a story, weaving an endless array of other threads and thoughts, composing poems as fragments, facets of the whole, set entirely in tandem with the rest of the collection, potentially incomplete outside of the larger manuscript.

always the blue mirror the Queen leaves behind
knows she will leave behind
her beauty squeezed like a lemon 

The mirror is an egg, gold-framed. It could be a compact
the Queen opens to catch or chalk her face. The hinges
shut with a chunk like a per cutter. 

She begins to feel she is limestone.

Mirror mirror she says who is and who is not the mirror
the minor who in all the land is? Who the most of all?
She has made a compact with someone on the other side
of silver, whose light & shadow move quick as spiders.

There, the mirror should have said.
Look into the mirror.
It is you. (“MIRROR,” “Snow White”)

There are such lovely flows and subtle shifts, from writing “lyre lyre pants on fire,” or even the title of the section that fragment rests within, the tenth and penultimate section of cold-press moon, “By the River Sticks.” The final section, also, including the delightful fragment: “you say what i say / is what i say you say // till everything is /rubbery from talk” (“IT’S OUR SLINKY WAY OF WALKING”). I am curious as to the final section of the collection, “Once Bitten,” that writes around Bram Stoker’s Dracula, especially given Cooley dedicated an entire poetry collection, seeing red, around the same character. One might ask what ground he would consider left uncovered from that prior collection, but, knowing a bit about Cooley’s work, I would wonder, instead, if that project prompted this (or vice versa). It suggests, possibly, that seeing red and cold-press moon are either sibling collections, or even part of the same larger project. “once bitten by poetry,” he writes, as part of the poem “LISTEN,” “your whole neck / aching with effort [.]” And why are so many of the lyrics of this cold-press moon populated with frogs? He hints at multiple, sly princes nestled across his fabled prairie, all of whom are hidden in plain sight. The poem ends:

you want to say some thing
your throat is shouting but
            you do not know
      what to do
                there is no
      one to listen to
one to care

The idea of the muse is something that has cropped up in numerous pieces of by Cooley over the years, writing poems around the act of writing as well as directly to the reader, so it is curious to see a full collection moving through those ideas in The Muse Sings. As part of such, two-thirds of the acknowledgments for this collection emerge from prior collections—his travel journal Passwords: Transmigrations between Canada and Europe (Kiel, Germany: l&fVerlag, 1996) and poetry collection Soul Searching (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987)—seemingly pulling earlier of his own poems out of one context and setting them down into another. Or perhaps, instead, and again, these are jumping-off points, allowing him to further explore what he had merely touched upon in those earlier works. The Muse Sings is a collection of poems for and after other writers, writing almost as an extension of the work from his Dedications (Thistledown Press, 1988), writing out those in his reading and writing vicinity. As he writes to open “the poet loves her machines,” a poem “for Nicole Markotić,” “loves the way / the printer / clicks in dismay or in pleasure moves / its arm / seeks permission [.]”

poetry: the ins and outs of

have added glowing rubrics
and placed in the margins
small and exquisite notes
a red letter day

in strange languages
something shows through
to put a shine on 

who’d have thought
would be our undoing
houdini inside the lines
drawn in ropes and chains
incandescent with moving 

would surely have listened
and spoken with the dead

The poems of The Muse Sings examine the act of writing and how poems emerge, moreso an act of creation from within and surrounded by the tangible offerings of a community than the invisible hand of any of the nine Greek Muses. As he writes as part of “Dear Dubé,” a poem “for Paulette Dubé” thar references “Our Lady / of Perpetual Help Pool Hall,” “i want to be part of the thousand / shocks flesh is err to / that pool of help & forgiveness // exactly when, their lines true, they clear the table / with all the joy & clatter they can muster [.]” He writes of his muse, his musings; of friends and influence, astonishments, hopes and disappointments, even as he dedicates the collection to Mnemosyne: the Greek goddess of memory, and, according to Hesiod, the mother of the nine Muses. Cooley muses, and offers this to that which has prompted, influenced, and even amused, fueling his own ongoing works. And then, of course, another reference to David Arnason, in the poem “world of reference,” which is dedicated to him. As the poem ends, Cooley writing out the place where the two might still be able to meet, in the space of the written and printed page: “the long path our words follow / through swinging gates / we are paging one another [.]”

These three titles, read and published simultaneously in the same publishing season, present a curious triptych of Cooley’s range and stretch of concerns writing out the prairie landscape, memory, breath and perspective. He writes in the tradition of the Canadian long poem, but one that is presented as accumulation and exhaustive study through the form of a prairie lyric engaged with play and pun, propelled by sound, meaning and language, and set squarely in a blend of the real and the mythic prairie. Cooley has, over the years, composed prairie lyrics less a sequence of book-projects than a prairie life-long lyric; what bpNichol termed a ‘poem as long as a life.’ And one might suspect that this lyric will long outlive him, also. One might even suspect there will be far more to see.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [photo credit: Stephen Brockwell] currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com