hungry for clarity

For so many days that have lengthened into nights and on into early mornings of the next day I have been drunk on words both heard and read, in stories and books. Now I've reached a point not of satiety but simple weariness. It's at times like this, worn down by the rich clutter of language, that I especially find poetry restorative and I'll go to a collection, hungry for clarity.

One of the poets short-listed last Wednesday night for the Trillium Awards is a dear friend whose poems I have turned to a lot since buying her first book, A Possible Landscape (1993), before I knew her, then seeing some works in progress, then finding myself frequently picking up and reading parts of the new book, Drowning Lessons, since its publication last autumn. What strikes me repeatedly when I read this newest book is that I keep forgetting it's "her" work I'm reading. Poem after poem takes me to a place that is still unfamiliar and the "I" in them someone else, as if rounding a curve in a road I know well yet seeing it almost as if for the first time.

This struck me again tonight, when I opened to the poem, "Dream of the Empty Shore," which begins --

             

  I'm here and not here where dusk stretches
                and flows along an empty beach that curves
                the edge of a lake near clattering reeds.

There's a sense here, as in so many of the other poems, of the poet's presence expressing itself through almost a metamorphosis with the place she finds herself and this comes about not through metaphor, but somehow through that "presence" being part of the landscape itself. "She" is present much as a doe in a field is, then becomes part of the grass, the nearby thicket, the movement of wind, then vanishing but still felt. There -- and not there. "Here and not here."

That first line of the poem, which I repeated several times to myself just to savour its smooth steady movement along three long lines, has great carrying power from the repeated sound of the long "e" in each line touching down in the consonants of dusk, curves, lake, and clattering. But there also came to me a sensation of stillness or pause or waiting, akin to what I feel when reading certain of Rilke's poems and especially The Duino Elegies. In the second Elegy I'm always caught in the passage about halfway in where there appears, mid-line, his "Siehe, die Baume sind . . ." :

            

Look: the trees exist; the houses
            we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we
            pass by it all, like a rush of air.

                                                        (Edward Snow's translation)

This sensibility -- here and not here -- or, as in Maureen Harris's poem, "Twilight":

            

Women stare into the dusk holding babies
            and wait for sleep, conversation,
            the second coming, anything at all
            to draw in-here and out-there
            together.

Here is an innerness of the poem's impetus meeting the edge of each day's solid shape, so that even in her more personal-seeming poems she is but part of what happens there, yielding to its movement, carrier and carried in a form beyond her person (the one I know): changed into the poem.

It's an odd experience, this, putting forward a response to the words being read, the poetry, late at night in a one-sided conversation. "Reviews" tend seldom to be organic, end up seeming fixed and solid, like cement. My father used to pour cement sidewalks, and as a child I watched the whole process with rapt attention. First there would be the wooden structure -- the form the sidewalk would take -- the ground beneath made flat and utterly smooth. Then he would shovel cement and gravel into his cement mixer, pour in water from a bucket, and start the motor. The churning sound seemed as much as the rotation to be doing the mixing, as if the mechanism were chewing the ingredients. Then the mass would be regurgitated into the waiting form and he would work at making the wet sludge smooth and even, trowelling quickly and easily and finally marking the lines and edges. When it hardened, the forms would be removed and what was once a lovely slosh of moving stuff would be hard, cold, and unchangeable.

That process approximates how I feel about reviewing. In my ideal world, people would live intimately with poetry, read and re-read it, say to someone close by: "just listen to this!" and the poem would enter their conversation and the conversation would lead to the reading of another poem, so that the poems would go beyond the book and possibly approach even in some small measure the place they started from.

Drowning Lessons is one of these books that I'll keep reading this way -- "a blessing passing between" ("The Drowned Boy").

So much more to be said about this book, poems of grief, loss, memory and more, all of them clear recognitions. And ghazals, and more. For next time.

Comments

[Bud Parr]

Norma - you and I are going to bust each other's book-buying budgets. Congrats to your friend!

[Norma]

"Budget?" You mean I'm supposed to have a budget? Is that how it's supposed to work? I've always functioned financially according to the "drunken sailor" modus operandi: payday, book spree, then two weeks of hardtack for dinner. (only a slight exaggeration) A genetic predisposition from many generations of post-Viking* down-at-heels Scandinavian sailor folk, and I suspect ideally suited for book-buying, since it seems that so many of the books I want to read vanish either utterly or into remainder hell and would in the absence of impulse require lengthy quests in pursuit of them.

*My offspring notes: "if you were a true Viking, you would swoop down in pre-dawn raids on bookstores to add to your word horde." These days, however, Danegeld has taken on a rather different meaning: euros don't have the same panache.