Ruth Roach Pierson
Aide-Mémoire (BuschekBooks, 2007)
Jacob Scheier
More to Keep Us Warm (ECW Press, 2007)
Sachiko Murakami
The Invisibility Exhibit (TalonBooks, 2008)
A.F. Moritz
The Sentinel (Anansi, 2008)
Weyman Chan
Noise From The Laundry (TalonBooks, 2008)
Read by Holly Luhning
There’s been no shortage of discussion about the GG nominees and winners recently. While the controversy surrounding the poetry category this year has provoked a plethora of blog rants, this review aims to focus on the work of the five nominees.
As the back cover blurbs suggest, More to Keep Us Warm addresses “the toughest of subjects,” such as God, religion, love, hate, relationships, illness, poetry, with an almost-earnest, sometimes-meandering, narrative voice. Scheier repeats the words love, god, hate, poetry frequently throughout the collection. At times, his longer poems use these touchstones in an innovative, intelligent manner; at others, the poetry spins in a too-pedantic circle. In poems such as “Red Diaspora,” “Tricking into Suicide,” and “North America,” Scheier combines a just-loose enough narrative voice with sharp irony to create original, surprising poetry. For example, in “North America,” he strings together Jerry Springer, fatherhood, Buddhism, hair conditioner, Hare Kristnas, vegetarian restaurants in Prague, Jesus, and Toronto at a quick clip, but manages to make the disparate connect. Speaking of Hare Kristnas, Scheier writes:
I didn’t want to tell them
I like my hair and turtlenecks too much
To ever be one of them.
But then again,
I guess I wouldn’t “need” conditioner.
Jesus didn’t use it
And he turned out okay.
Often, Scheier’s narrative approach leaves space for the poems to find their way to a rare, wry sensibility. However, there are times when this strategy falls short. In “Stuff” Scheier includes a manifesto on love that borders on abstract and glib:
But I don’t hate them —
god and love.
I’ve heard they are the same thing.
This is so absurd , it might be true.
I respect that
as much as I hate
that love requires an equal amount of respect and loathing.
Why am I having trouble getting laid recently?
Some of Scheier’s shorter, more lyric poems are among the most successful work in this collection. In “That Night,” Scheier speaks of relationships, choices, and time elegantly; the speaker insists “We are past that now, / quickly approaching the beginning, / the invisible rip in your summer dress.”
Throughout More to Keep us Warm, Scheier engages with the speaker’s relationship to Judaism and poetry, sometimes separately, but often in combination. He creates an engaging discussion, but there are some confusing, though potentially challenging moments. In “Kaddish for 1956” Scheier begins by musing on Ginsberg, “Howl,” America, New York, and Baraka, but moves the poem towards a musing on the relationship between the speaker’s poetry and CanLit, saying “Though I could use a latté, before I get started, before I deliver / the first blow to CanLit sensibility.” He follows this sentiment with “Fuck, I’m not contemporary enough for publication. I’m too narrative, too personal. Or, I should just tell CanLit to go / fuck yourself with your regional aesthetics.” Interestingly, Scheier doesn’t reference CanLit, or any Canadian writers (with the exception of Di Brandt) in the rest of the collection. While Scheier likely isn’t alone in having this sort of frustration gaining publication, I wonder if he might have been able to follow through on this discussion with a more subtle, or sophisticated manner. Overall, More to Keep Us Warm tackles some big issues: religion, gender relations, death, love, hate, and takes some poetic risks while doing it. The results range between the sparkling and the absurd.
A.F. Moritz’s The Sentinel, like Scheier’s collection, addresses some large-scale subjects, such as love, the body, and spirituality. Moritz’s language is beautifully wrought, precise and hypnotic. Poems such as “Hospital,” “Place,” and “Cassandra” among others epitomize poetic fluidity and grace. Moritz employs a canny sense of metaphor; he uses the device often sparingly, but with great effect. In “Nostalgia,” the speaker repeats, gently, of his/her reckoning with a crossroads:
And then: the corner. Why
Did I wake there, at that crossway with its closed
and faintly glowing store, and a few faces,
a smile, a serious look, in the café window?
Moritz also has a talent for looking at abandoned minuate of everyday life. In “The Jar,” the speaker uses an old, store-bought glass jar as the root image for a poem that branches into considerations about domestic space, personal histories, and possible futures. Moritz also weaves pieces about the natural world with poems about the urban and the domestic. Moritz closes the collection with “The Sun,” a poem that considers the cycle of life and death brought about by “My sun” which the speaker “see[s] your colour fall / again on everything on earth.” Overall, Moritz deftly explores philosophical questions with well-crafted, smooth language.
The Invisibility Exhibit marks the absent, humanizes the statistics. Murakami’s collection revolves around the realities and myths of missing women in Vancouver’s East Side; the poet focuses on “the girl, a folded unit,” (“News Development”) and on the wake their absences create, both for the people they have left behind and the legal and media systems which process and re-tell the disappearances. Murakami’s poetry is tense, vibrant, and exceptionally crafted.
The first section of the book frequently employs the second voice, addressing and involving the reader directly. In “Exhibit A (Boxes)” the speaker instructs the reader to “Leave the box beneath the tree. Leave parents to their cruelty. / For dinner, try pasta, try fury, try feeding after fray. / Try a split lip. Try Exhibit A.” Murakami connects the quotidian with the violent; she repeatedly illustrates the two are close bedfellows. In “Restrictions” the speaker explains “we are well-heeled we / are posted we have no trouble invoking a royal tone” but ends the poem warning “all these rights to language we have and enact / not knowing how easily we could choke.” Malice and violence do not make exception for women who have privilege or voice; Murakami’s “well-heeled” women are less, but still susceptible to the same violence that assumedly claimed the women listed in “Portrait of Sonnet as Missing Woman.”
Murakami references fairy tales, modern and traditional, throughout the collection. The poems graphically shatter the gloss and happy-endings of such tales, illustrating not only the limited, objectified roles women play in these narratives, but also how the objectification of women, taken to the extreme, results in a fractured perception of the female body. In “Allusion,” the poet writes:
Two girls walk in different stories
Towards two words
Of satisfaction and the crowd
That would catch the bouquet.
The carriage rolls up to the corner.
In it, the prince’s face, shadowed;
we see instead that shoe turned up
as evidence. What else? The parts
that fit into other parts, unearthed
self, her bartered sex.
The collection skillfully navigates the paradox of revealing the extent of objectification of women in both forensic investigations and media reports, while humanizing and individualizing missing and deceased women. In “We Were the Smallest Humans on Earth,” Murakami references the Bodyworlds 3 exhibit and questions how the exhibit displays female bodies. Bodyworlds aims to present bodies in a supposed anonymous fashion. The speaker wonders “If the women are bent by strangers to protect that which marks them female”; the poem concludes with the speaker moving to imagine “Then in parts that name her/our life become imagined / or snuck out on a cell phone” and asking “Can ____ be emptied of space and self and other?” Murakami’s poems challenge the generic with the specific, anonymity with the personal.
The final poem of the collection insists “What gentleness we must muster now, to lift DNA // from a microscopic edge, to protect / the whole of the woman contained there.” Murakami’s collection succeeds in embodying this gentleness, along with a startling poetic sensitivity and strength.
Ruth Roach Pierson’s Aide-Mémoire is a bold and honest retrospective of the speaker’s personal history; Pierson’s voice is strong and frank without straying into the sentimental. Pierson’s work is a risk; it is simultaneously personal and public, but the poet’s linguistic skill and subjective sensibility render gems of poems that chronicle not only one woman’s life, but a woman’s life contextualized and illuminated by the (modern) historical periods in which she has lived. In “A Distant Caw,” a poem set in the speaker’s early adult years, Pierson writes
You complained that I collect experiences
The way boys collect baseball cards.
And I did. Repose, an empty canvas
To be filled, still water to be stirred.
At times, Pierson speaks of places and times as much as the speaker’s personal experience. In “Jim Dine in Ludwigsburg” Pierson writes “Jim Dine / spurted to the top of New York’s art charts. // It was the 1960s, / the colours psychedelic.” Conversely, Pierson does not shy away from marking or defining a period of time through private experience. In “Thinking of a Former Student in Early Autumn” she recalls “we lied to you then / who lay frail against pillows, / wasted from within by cells run /amok, charting your future.” Pierson’s work is undoubtedly heartwrenching, but she never once strays to the arguably easy road of emotion evoked through sentimentality. Her work is bare, unabashed, and beautifully written.
Weyman Chan’s Noise From the Laundry negotiates ancestral history with lived experience. Chan charts bridges between the speaker’s understandings of new and old; he links China of a generation ago with Airdrie ranches and sprawling Calgary. In “children of the corn” Chan identifies both tension and strength in both geographical and generational differences. He writes “For too long, these hooks / called family these transfusions called daily grind / have coursed through like iodine.” Chan layers Chinese food, tastes, smells at first, seemingly over Western Canadian experience, but soon the distinction between “Chinese” and “Albertan” experience blurs, undermining categories of difference and challenging labels such as immigrant, native, home, away. In “goodbye to the foster parents” the speaker explores the merging of spatial and familial change; temporary situations flow into permanent settlements. The speaker explains “Now Dad’s come for me and my sister… / In his pocket is a photo of our new mother.” Chan writes:
Dad gets to left me up to the saddle.
His holding me is the same as Uncle Phil’s —
blanket-comforting safety. But
who is he I’m taught he’s my Dad but tiny feet and bud-fingers
Don’t know where to hold.
In his negotiation of change, stasis, home, and identity, Chan makes the familiar strange and vice versa. In “spaceships” he moves the discussion of difference beyond earthly limitations of geographical and ethnic history. A boy and his brother watch a U.F.O.; the speaker realizes
that the aliens were at least a curious as we were,
only looking down at us from their spaceship windows
but not only looking down at us. They were deciding
on which snowy roof to land.
“Pick ours,” I whispered under my breath. “Pick ours.”
Chan celebrates this curiosity and presents the desire to connect with the new and different as a positive, universal drive. Noise From the Laundry broaches its subject matter in an original and frank manner with a lush, honest, and provocative narrative voice.
