matrix

Wolsak and Wynn, 2008

Read by Karis Shearer

Oana Avasilichioaei’s second collection of poems, feria: a poempark, is a sophisticated exploration of history, geography, language, and textuality in the phenomenological or proprioceptive tradition of Robert Kroetsch’s The Ledger and Daphne Marlatt and Robert Minden’s Steveston — both of which Avasilichioaei cites as influences in the book’s bibliography.   Like the latter two volumes, feria: a poempark concerns itself with the complex and sometimes fraught histories of a local space (in this case, Hastings Park, Vancouver), which the poet delves into by treating Hastings Park as a palimpsest whose many layers include George Black’s 1869 slaughterhouse and hotel, the Pacific National Exibition grounds, the Japanese-Canadian internment memorial gardens, an Italian garden, and a racetrack, among others. This process of excavation is enacted poetically in a section titled “Spirit of the West!” in which Avasilichioaei creates new texts through the partial erasure of older documents relating to the park’s official and unofficial histories from 1910 through to 1973 — including the minutes of PNE annual meetings, The Vancouver Daily News, a letter from Muriel Fujiwara Kitagawa (an interned Nisei) to her brother Wesley, and the Bulletin of the Vancouver Exhibition Association:

culture in all its phases                  will

Be     major imp                        ,

the Board of Control   at    attention

of our provincial          act…

What is particularly remarkable about this volume, however, is the way in which Avasilichioaei makes the book’s material textuality one of her subjects: aspects of the traditional book become matter for poetry: “In the building of a book / there are techniques / one must learn / to keep the wolves out” and, in the process, the boundaries between poem and park are frequently collapsed: “For one brief moment no boundary was a boundary,” as the compound word from the volume’s title, “poempark,” suggests. Refusing a single point of origin (“origin is unoriginal”), the first fourteen pages (a poem called “Prologue”) are unpaginated, while its table of contents presents itself as a poem called “some streams.” In the Olsonian line of open form poetics,

the book opens and questions

leaves imprints

in the wet grass

The lovely pun on “leaves” here is characteristic of the larger linguistic playfulness of this book; “leaves” is potentially both a verb (the book leaves imprints in the grass), or one of two nouns (leaves of a tree or leaves / pages of the book). Similarly, a later poem, “Momiji Garden,” frequently deploys the same word as both noun and verb: “writing / the letter of needs / animals the animal” and “artery of the palm / faces the palm’s face.”

Published by Wolsak and Wynn, feria: a poempark was printed by The Coach House Printing Company on Zephyr Antique Laid paper with green flyleaves; it is thus not only an aesthetically gorgeous reading experience, but one in which those who appreciate the tactile experience of reading will revel.